03 March 2008

March 2008

After a massive fireball smashed into southeastern Peru last fall, scientists dismissed a shot-down spy satellite as the cause. But many questions remain about the unusual crater it left behind. Andrew Westoll reports

When the Pentagon announced last Monday that it had successfully shot down a wayward U.S. spy satellite, political-conspiracy theorists went wild. Officials called the cosmic potshot a matter of international security - the bus-sized satellite, too big to burn up on re-entry, was carrying more than 500 kilograms of toxic hydrazine gas - but America-watchers worldwide wondered aloud whether the satellite story was a pretext for the U.S. military to flex its space-racing muscles.

For me, though, the event reminded me not of the Star Wars debate, but instead whisked me back to a tiny farming village in southeastern Peru I had visited last November.

I had travelled to the hamlet of Carancas, located a llama's throw from the Bolivian border on the stark plains of the Andean Altiplano, to investigate the Carancas crater, another cosmic event that had also been shrouded in conspiracy theories and, more recently, has posed a profound scientific riddle.

On Sept. 15 of last year, at 11:45 in the morning, a massive fireball streaked across the sky above southeastern Peru and slammed into a dry stream bed in Carancas.

The resulting explosion shook the earth and threw a mushroom cloud of corkscrewing smoke and scorched rock hundreds of metres into the air. Hundreds of Aymaran villagers, who had otherwise been enjoying a restful Saturday, flocked to the site to see what had happened.

The impact made international headlines and set the Internet alight with rumours - 600 villagers were rushed to the hospital; police confiscated fragments of the extraterrestrial object and sold them to rabid American space-junk collectors; the Russian tabloid Pravda said the impact was caused by a downed American spy satellite and the mass sickness was the result of hydrazine leakage from its fuel tank - a claim that seemed laughable at the time, but now seems frighteningly within the realm of possibility.

Meanwhile, it took scientists from Lima a week to visit the site, during which time the prevailing wisdom among locals was that Chile had dropped a bomb on them.

In time, most of these rumours were laid to rest. Scientists confirmed that the object that landed in Carancas was a meteorite; that roughly 30 villagers had developed nausea and headaches - likely symptoms of mild psychological trauma and not, as many had claimed, a Michael Crichton-style Andromeda strain; and that Peru was not at war with its southern neighbour.

At the same time, though, a bona fide scientific mystery was presenting itself. Out of that blackened hole in the Peruvian high plain emerged a puzzle that threatens to turn the science of crater formation on its head.

"The Carancas impact crater should not have happened," says Dr. Peter Schultz, a professor of planetary impacts in the geological sciences Department at Brown University and the lead author of a paper on the Carancas event to be given this month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in League City, Tex.

For researchers who have relied for years upon an established model, Dr. Schultz says, the Carancas meteorite has thrown a "hypervelocity curveball."

An analysis of fragments suggest that the Carancas object was an ordinary chondrite, or stony meteorite, a remnant from the ancient asteroid belt that spawned the planets of our solar system. Chondrites, being relatively weak, typically lose most of their velocity as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. They ablate, or burn up, and break into fragments, which land with little fanfare at a speed of no more than 100 and 150 metres per second - as if they had simply been dropped from an airplane.

This is not what happened at Carancas.

"Although we don't know what size it was when it entered the atmosphere," Dr. Schultz says, "the fact is, by the time is got through, this thing was still more than a metre wide and still going incredibly fast."

Acoustical data reveal that the Carancas meteorite was travelling at a speed of four to six kilometres a second. The resulting hole in the ground has all the characteristics of an impressive "shock-produced" crater, as opposed to the far less dramatic "penetration" craters usually caused by chondrites: It's circular, nearly 15 metres wide, at least three metres deep, has a well-defined rim and a long ray of ejected debris stretching more than 300 metres to the southwest. A nearby house had a hole punched through its metal roof by a flying piece of stone. Seismic evidence suggests that the meteorite landed with a force equivalent to the detonation of more than two tonnes of TNT.

"When this thing landed," Dr. Schultz says, "many of us said, 'No. This can't be.' Up until now, conventional wisdom has been that these sorts of small craters are caused by iron meteorites, not stone."

Although chondrites are the most common type of meteorite to enter the Earth's atmosphere, they account for only about 5 per cent of those that make it through intact. The majority of meteorites found on the ground are made of much heavier iron, which is more likely to survive the baptism-by-fire of atmospheric entry.

"Without Carancas," Dr. Schultz says, "we wouldn't have known this was possible."

The event has sparked an ongoing collaboration among researchers in Canada, the U.S., Peru, Bolivia and Uruguay. But Dr. Schultz admits to having an early favourite among the theories to explain Carancas. It stems from a surprising discovery he and his colleagues made while working on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Magellan Mission to Venus in the early 1990s.

"We found that when you increase the atmospheric pressure on a cloud of debris, individual particles tend to line up in a narrow, needle-like fashion," Dr. Schultz says. "They align themselves like a flock of geese does in order to reduce the aerodynamic drag."

He wonders if the Carancas chondrite did, indeed, break up upon entry, but then the fragments reshaped themselves into a sort of extraterrestrial drill, maintaining much of their speed and then boring into the ground one after the other in rapid succession.

Whatever the explanation, the Carancas event has sent a shockwave of second-guessing throughout this small corner of the planetary sciences. Conventional models of meteorite cratering and entry physics may need to be recast. Circular depressions on the Earth's surface that had previously been dismissed as potential craters because of the absence of iron may, indeed, be meteor footprints. And chondrites may be contributing more than initially thought to the surface composition of planets such as Mars, where a number of similar small craters have been found.

Comment: In other words, impacts from cometary and asteroidal debris may be much greater than previously thought.

When I arrived at the Carancas crater site two months after the event, I found the surrounding high plains cold and deserted. I gazed into the pond of murky water that had collected at the bottom of the crater and tried to imagine it roiling violently, a column of blue smoke spiralling into the air. Then a chorus of voices reached me from a far-off church and three Aymaran ladies appeared, wrapped in traditional cloaks and skirts.

They told me that they won't know how to feel about the meteorite until next year's harvest. Only then will they decide if it was a good meteor - un meteoro simpatico - or a bad one. These ladies and their neighbours may have been the first humans in recorded history to witness the formation of an impact crater, but they didn't seem impressed. Their goal, they said, was to dig up the meteorite and put it on display, right next to the crater, for tourists.

Comment: They may be the first humans to witness and survive the formation of an impact crater.

Sadly, the meteorite, or what remains of it, may never be recovered. Chondrites tend to ionize and dissolve in water, and as I write this, the rainy season is arriving in southeastern Peru.

As for the crater itself, experts believe that, without the resources to protect it, this remarkable site and the mysteries it spawned may soon be washed away.

Andrew Westoll is a writer who lives in Toronto. His first book, The Riverbones, is a travel memoir set in Suriname and will be published this fall by McClelland & Stewart.

It appears that predictions made by Wal Thornhill and the ElectricComet model are being quickly confirmed, whether mainstream astronomerslike it or not. In the end, it seems nature will be the arbiter ofwhich model is the most accurate and predictive.

The Electric Comet[1.8Mb PDF] is a poster presentation from the Electrical andElectronics Engineers 33rd International Conference on Plasma Sciences(ICOPS), presented in early June 2006.

In fact, predictions of electrical interactions at comets date back to comments from Harold Spencer Jones in his textbook General Astronomy (pp. 273-274) and such visionary works as Kristian Birkeland's theory of comets way back in 1913, among others'.

In the initial news releases upon receipt of the Stardust mission'spayload, scientists intimated that the materials received from Stardustappeared to contradict the "dirty snowball" model of cometsinsofar as the materials retrieved appeared to have been "born in fire"rather than in the cold outer reaches (or the imagined Oort Cloud). Thematerials returned appeared to be crystalline in nature and inconfigurations that are only produced in regions of intense heat and high pressure.

News releases over recent weeks have now gone on to intimate thatnot only do the materials collected appear to have been born in fire,but "the Stardust material resembles chondritic meteorites from theasteroid belt" more so than the expectations of a "dirty snowball" or"snowy dirtball" model of comets.

Returning to the Electric Comet poster presentation, Wal Thornhillet al laid out the differences in approach, assumptions andexpectations of the standard model of "dirty snowballs" and of the"Electric Comet" model.

DIRTY SNOWBALL MODEL:

* Comets are composed of undifferentiated "protoplanetary debris" --dust and ices left over from the formation of the solar system billionsof years ago.

* Radiant heat from the Sun sublimates the ices. The vapor expandsaround the nucleus to form the coma and is swept back by the solar windto form the tail.

* Over repeated passages around the Sun, solar heat vaporizes surface ice and leaves a "rind" of dust.

* Where heat penetrates the surface of a blackened, shallow crust,pockets of gas form. Where the pressure breaks through the surface,energetic jets form.

ELECTRIC COMET MODEL:

* Comets are debris produced during violent electrical interactionsof planets and moons in an earlier phase of solar system history.Comets are similar to asteroids, and their composition varies. Mostcomets should be homogeneous -- their interiors will have the samecomposition as their surfaces. They are simply "asteroids on eccentricorbits."

* Comets follow their elongated paths within a weak electrical fieldcentered on the Sun. In approaching the Sun, a charge imbalancedevelops between the nucleus and the higher voltage and charge densitynear the Sun. Growing electrical stresses initiate discharges and theformation of a glowing plasma sheath, appearing as the coma and tail.

* The jets' explode from cometary nuclei at supersonic speeds andretain their coherent structure for hundreds of thousands of miles. Thecollimation of such jets is a well-documented attribute of plasmadischarge.

* The tails of comets reveal well-defined filaments extending up totens of millions of miles without dissipating in the vacuum of space.This "violation" of neutral gas behavior in a vacuum is to be expectedof a plasma discharge within the ambient electric field of the Sun.

* It is the electric force that holds the spherical cometary coma inplace as the comet races around the Sun. The diameter of the visiblecoma will often reach millions of miles. And the visible coma issurrounded by an even larger and more "improbable" spherical envelopeof fluorescing hydrogen visible in ultraviolet light.

* The primary distinction between comet and asteroid surfaces isthat electrical arcing and "electrostatic cleaning" of the cometnucleus will leave little or no dust or debris on the surface duringthe active phase, even if a shallow layer of dust may be attracted backto the nucleus electrostatically as the comet becomes dormant in itsretreat to more remote regions.

In contrast to the "dirty snowball" model touted by many astronomersand/or astrophysicists as the pinnacle of their predictive ability,Thornhill et al have predicted that comets should in factturn out to be consistent with the composition of asteroids, insofar asthey are rocky bodies traveling in the sun's plasmapshere.

It is this assertion that comets and asteroids have common genesisand will display common features and composition that is yet another experimentum crucis for the Electric Comet model. An experimentum crucis is defined by Wikipedia as:

[...] an experiment capable of decisively determining whether or nota particular hypothesis or theory is correct. In particular, such anexperiment must typically be able to produce a predictable result thatno established hypothesis or theory is capable of producing.

The production of such an experiment is considered necessary for aparticular hypothesis or theory to be considered an established part ofthe body of scientific knowledge. It is not unusual in the history ofscience for theories to be developed fully before producing a criticalexperiment. A given theory which is in accordance with known experimentbut which has not yet produced a critical experiment is typicallyconsidered worthy of exploration in order to discover such anexperimental test.

Under the definition of a critical experiment (experimentum crucis),a prediction must be distinct from the predictions of other theoriessuch that a clear test can be performed in order to distinguish whichprediction is correct, and which prediction is incorrect.

To put it simply, the standard model expected comets to be the coldremnants of an "accretion disk," or water and/or volatiles cementedtogether in or beyond the cold outer reaches of the solar system (inlater revisions, the water and volatiles, not having been observed onthe surface, were posited to exist below the surface, invisible andhidden out of the reach of our observational power).

The Electric Comet model, on the other hand, expects comets todisplay relatively homogeneous composition similar to that ofmeteorites. In fact, the Electric Comet model appears to say that theyhave common origin in catastrophic electrical discharges that literallyelectrically machined the surfaces of planets in our solar system in arelatively recent geological epoch, leaving identifiable electricalscars on those parent bodies and often on the comet / asteroid surfacesas well.

Data and samples retrieved from cometary bodies have not borne outthe standard model scientists' claim unambiguously. They have claimedthat OH radicals are evidence of water on the comet nucleus which havebeen reconfigured through UV interactions (photolysis). However, theElectric Comet model provides an alternative vantage point, asdiscussed in the Electric Comet poster presentation:

When astronomers view the comas of comets spectroscopically, whatthey actually see is the hydroxyl radical (OH), which they assume to bea residue of water (H2O) broken down by the ultraviolet light of theSun (photolysis). This assumption is not only unwarranted, it requiresa speed of "processing" by solar radiation beyond anything that can bedemonstrated experimentally.

The mysteries find direct answers electrically - in the transactionbetween a negatively charged comet nucleus and the Sun. In the electricmodel, negative oxygen ions are accelerated away from the comet inenergetic jets, then combine preferentially with protons from the solarwind to form the observed OH radical and the neutral hydrogen gatheredaround the coma in vast concentric bubbles. These abundances simplyconfirm the energetic charge exchange between the nucleus and the Sun.

The electric model thus resolves two problems for the standard theory:

1. Cometologists have never verified that the assumed photolysis isfeasible on the super-efficient scale their "explanation" requires.

2. Neutral hydrogen is far too plentiful in the coma to be the"leftover" of the hypothesized conversion of water into OH. But if thenegatively charged nucleus provides the electrons in a charge exchangewith the solar wind, the dilemma is resolved and the vast hydrogenenvelope is a predictable effect.

While the standard model scientists' assertion of "proof of water"appears all well and good on the surface, they have not provided labtests that verify their assertion that the mechanism they propose works"as proposed" on the scale involved.

On the other hand, initial lab tests of the materials returned byStardust appear to bear out somewhat unambiguously the assertions ofelectrical theorists relating to the Electric Comet subset of theElectric Universe model.

Specifically, releases by physorg.com and Wired Newsappear to directly confirm the assertion by electrical theorists thatthe comets would, on final analysis be consistent with the compositionof asteroids rather than the imagined "dirty snowball" of prior theory.

The physorg.com article comments:

When the Stardust mission returned to Earth with samples from thecomet Wild 2 in 2006, scientists knew the material would provide newclues about the formation of our solar system, but they didn't knowexactly how.

New research by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborators reveals that, inaddition to containing material that formed very close to the youngsun, the dust from Wild 2 also is missing ingredients that would beexpected in comet dust. Surprisingly, the Wild 2 comet sample better resembles a meteorite from the asteroid belt rather than an ancient, unaltered comet.

Comets are expected to contain large amounts of the most primitive material in the solar system, a treasure trove of stardust from other stars and other ancient materials. But in the case of Wild 2, that simply is not the case.

By comparing the Stardust samples to cometary interplanetary dustparticles (CP IDPs), the team found that two silicate materialsnormally found in cometary IDPs, together with other primitivematerials including presolar stardust grains from other stars, have notbeen found in the abundances that might be expected in a Kuiper Beltcomet like Wild 2. [...] the Stardust material resembles chondritic meteorites from the asteroid belt. [Emphasis added]

This appears to be yet another notch in the belt of physicist WalThornhill and other contributing Electric Universe proponents. We lookforward to further tests on the samples and further confirmation ofthese theories from independent lines of inquiry.

One might also note the existence of "Centaurs" (planetoids), several of which (Chiron, 60558 Echeclus, and 166P/NEAT 2001 T4) are already known to display both features of asteroidsandcomets.These may be a missing link between the two designations, and bearmerit for further investigation into their specific properties(composition, conductivity, resistivity of surface materials, etc.).

It indeed appears that nature will be the final arbiter of who isright and who is wrong. Here's to more confirmed predictions and tomany great scientific discoveries yet to come. I look forward tofurther exploring the wild new plasma frontiers in future entries.

The largest crater in the Chiemgau field in Bavaria is water-filled Tuttensee, located near the village of Marwang. At the water surface, Tόttensee measures 1,200 feet across. but the original crater may have been twice as large.

The 1.1-kilometre (0.7-mile) diameter rock wacked into southeastern Bavaria, leaving an"exceptional field" of meteorites and impact craters that stretch fromthe town of Altoetting to an area around Lake Chiemsee, the scientists said in an article in the latest issue of US magazine Astronomy.

Colliding with the Earth's atmosphere at more than 43,000 kmsmilesper hour, the space rock probably broke up at an altitude of 70kmsmiles), they believe.

The biggest chunk smashed into the ground with a force equivalent to 106 million tonnes of TNT, or 8,500 Hiroshima bombs.

"The forest beneath the blast would have ignited suddenly, burninguntil the impact's blast wave shut down the conflagration," theinvestigators said.

"Dust may have been blown into the stratosphere, where it would havebeen transported around the globe easily... The region must have beendevastated for decades."

The biggest crater is now a circular lake called Tuettensee,measuring 370 metres (1,200 feet) across. Scores of smaller craters andother meteorite impacts can be spotted in an elliptical field,inflicted by other debris.

The study was carried out by the Chiemgau Impact Research Team,whose five members included a mineralogist, a geologist and anastronomer.

It was sparked by a find in 2000 by amateur archaeologists who weredigging in the area around Lake Chiemsee and found pieces of metalcontaining minerals not previously seen in the region.

Aerial infrared photography established that the distinctive holesin the local countryside had the characteristic round form and "clearuplifted rim" of an impact crater, the Astronomy report said.

Minerals ejected around the crater were found by geological analysisto be gupeiite and xifengite, iron-silicon alloys that were also foundin meteorites recovered in China and Antarctica.

Additional evidence comes from local discoveries of Celtic artefacts, which appear to have been scorched on one side.

That helped to establish an approximate date for the impact of between 480 and 30 BC.

The figure may be fine-tuned to around 200 BC, thanks to tree-ringevidence from preserved Irish oaks, which show a slowing in growtharound 207 BC.

This may have been caused by a veil of dust kicked up the impact, which filtered out sunlight.

In addition, Roman authors at about the same time wroteabout showers of stones falling from the skies and terrifying thepopulace.

The object is more likely to have been a comet than an asteroid,given the length of the ellipse and scattered debris, the report says.

Comets, which race in long orbits around the solar system, arebelieved to be loose assemblies of rubble held together with an icerich in methane, ammonia and water.

Asteroids are believed to be denser, more structured rocks. Theymainly orbit in a band between Jupiter and Mars, but they can bedeflected off course and put on the same trajectory as Earth, an eventthat is extremely rare but has the potential for a catastrophe.

The long reign of the dinosaurs was put to an end by climate changesome 65 million years ago, inflicted by a massive space rock impact inwhat is now modern-day Mexico.

In 1908, a comet or asteroid exploided over Tunguska, Siberia, flattening the forest for hundreds of square kilometres around.

In the early fifth century, rampaging Goths swept through Italy.Inviolate for 1,100 years, Rome was sacked by the hordes in 410 AD. StAugustine's apologia, the City of God, set the tone for Christians forthe next 16 centuries.

But the Rome of that era came close to suffering a far worsecalamity. A small metallic asteroid descended from the sky, making ahypervelocity impact in an Apennine valley just 60 miles east of thecity. This bus-sized lump of cosmic detritus vaporised as it hit theground. In doing so, it released energy equivalent to around 200kilotonnes of TNT: around 15 times the power of the atomic bomb thatlevelled Hiroshima in 1945.

Pescara is on the Adriatic coast, located across the Italianpeninsula from Rome. Housed there is the International Research Schoolof Planetary Sciences, where staff and students study topics rangingfrom planetary geology to astrobiology. In 1999, a young impactcratering specialist from Sweden, Jens Ormö, arrived to take up athree-year position funded by the European Union.

Ormö, it happens, is keen on hill walking, and just inland fromPescara are some of the most spectacular mountains in the Apennines. Hedecided that some hiking in the area of the Sirente Massif was inorder, and so he consulted a local guidebook. As he thumbed its pages,Ormö came across a photograph of something that amazed him. What hesaw, labelled as a natural lake, was surely an impact crater.

An expedition to the site of the putative impact, on the Sirenteplain, was hastily organised. Colleagues confirmed Ormö's initialsuspicion. Here was an impact crater about 140 metres wide, previouslyunrecognised despite lying only a short distance from a busy road, andvisible from miles away. It has appeared on maps for centuries, and inguidebooks for decades - but no one had recognised its significance.

Natural lakes are common in the area. But this one has a raised rim,now about two metres high, but originally rather thicker. This wasproduced by the asteroid throwing material out from the impact zone, asit crashed at a speed of around 20km per second, producing a hugeexplosion. Later filled with rainwater, the crater is now only a fewmetres deep, and occasionally dries up during hot summers. But it wasmore than 30 metres to the bottom when first formed. Centuries ofweathering has eroded its bank and gradually filled it in.

Relatively modest craters like this are unusual, because smallasteroids can only reach the ground intact if they are metallic, andthus strong enough to withstand the physical shock of slamming into theatmosphere at such speeds. The best guess at present is that theasteroid was about 10 metres across, and had a composition similar tonickel-iron meteorites. If it had been stony in composition, as mostasteroids are, it would have shattered in flight and released all ofits energy in a phenomenal explosion. This is what happened when a50-metre rock blew up over Siberia in 1908, leaving no crater.Theexpectation of a metallic impactor is backed up by the identificationof rust grains in the surrounding soil.

Confirmation of the impact origin comes from 17 smaller craters,typically 10 metres wide, scattered around the Sirente plain. These aredue to fragments of the asteroid that separated in flight through theatmosphere. A magnetic survey shows that most are associated withanomalously high fields, indicating sub-surface metallic lumps.

Crater fields like this are not unusual. In central Australia, 120kmsouth of Alice Springs, the Henbury craters were formed in a similarway. What is peculiar about the Sirente crater is where it occurred,and its youth. Dozens of ancient craters are known in northern Europe,geological stability allowing their long-term preservation. Twoexamples are the Ries and Steinheim basins in Germany. Many others areknown in Scandinavia. But these are all huge, and millions of yearsold. There is a small, recently formed crater in Estonia, but theSirente crater is of far greater interest: it was excavated around thetime of the fall of the Roman Empire, and close to Rome itself.

The crater has been dated through radiocarbon analysis of a drillcore cut down through the bank. The uppermost material, having beenthrown out of the cavity, contains organic matter older than theimpact. At the original ground level the radiocarbon ages minimise, andthen deeper down the material is older again.

The data indicate that the crater was formed in about 412 AD, withan uncertainty of 40 years in either direction. Additional sampling mayallow this spread to be reduced, but it is clear that the eventoccurred close to the fall of Rome: some time between 370 AD and 450AD, when the city was again under attack, this time by the Vandals.

No matter what the trajectory of the asteroid entry, it would havebeen a phenomenal sight from Rome, and scarier still for those closerto ground zero. The fireball produced would have only lasted 10 secondsor so, but would have been brighter than the sun, and so visible evenin daytime. The smoke trail left in the atmosphere would have beenvisible for some hours.

Another remarkable aspect of the event is that the main crater sitssquarely in the middle of the Sirente plain, which is only about a milelong, and half that wide, being surrounded by mountainous terrain. Itcould be that this is just luck. Alternatively, the array of cratersnow identified might represent only a tiny fraction of the havocwreaked, with many other impacts on the mountainsides having long sinceeroded or been hidden by tree growth.

Even considering simply the energy involved in forming the knowncrater, it is sobering to ponder what might have happened should theimpact zone have been on the flat coastal plains nearer Rome, ratherthan in the mountains. Scaling from nuclear bomb tests indicates that a200 kilotonne surface explosion would devastate an area of 100 squarekilometres.

A frequently used aphorism says that Rome was not built in a day.That's true. But it did come awfully close to being destroyed inseconds.

Could a comet hitting the Earth 1,500 years ago have triggered a global disaster in which millions of people lost their lives?

It is an old claim that historians say has little evidence inwritten records to support it, but now a tree ring expert has said theidea must be re-examined.

Mike Baillie, professor of palaeoecology at Queen's University inBelfast, UK, said it was very clear from the narrowness of growth ringsin bog oaks and archaeological timbers that a great catastrophe struckthe Earth in AD 540.

"The trees are unequivocal that something quite terrible happened,"he told the British Association's Festival of Science. "Not only inNorthern Ireland and Britain, but right across northern Siberia, Northand South America - it is a global event of some kind."

Dark Ages

Professor Baillie favours the idea that cometary fragments smashedinto the atmosphere throwing up dust and gas that blocked out the Sun.This, in turn, led to crop failures, famine and even plague among theweakened peoples of the world.

Professor Baillie said astronomers from Armagh Observatory inNorthern Ireland had published research 10 years ago in which they saidthe Earth would have been at risk from cometary bombardment between theyears AD 400 and AD 600.

"This event is in AD 540, so it fits very nicely into the window," he said.

"We know from the tree rings to the year exactly when this eventhappened. And some archaeologists and historians are beginning to comeround to the opinion that this was the date when the Dark Ages began inNorthern Europe. It wasn't just when the Romans left."

Oral tradition

However, there are many more historians who believe that if such amajor event had occurred there would be much clearer references to thedisaster in written texts. But Professor Baillie urged them to go backand look again - "to read between the lines".

He said mythical stories certainly seemed to point to a cometstriking the Earth at about the right time. He said King Arthur died inthis period and some stories talk about long arms in the sky deliveringmighty blows.

"Mythology tells you and history doesn't and that raisessome very interesting questions because the implication is that youcould suppress the written word but you couldn't suppress the oraltradition."

Professor Baillie said chemical analysis would be carried out on thetree rings to investigate the comet idea further. He hopes also to getaccess to ice cores to see if they record any interesting data thatmight support the comet theory.

The mystery of the origins of the red dragon symbol, now on the flagof Wales, has perplexed many historians, writers and romanticists, andthe archaeological community generally has refrained from commenting onthis most unusual emblem, claiming it does not concern them. In theancient Welsh language it is known as 'Draig Goch' - 'red dragon', and in "Y Geiriadur Cymraeg Prifysgol Cymru",the "University of Wales Welsh Dictionary", (Cardiff, University ofWales Press, 1967, p. 1082) there are translations for the various usesof the Welsh word 'draig'. Amongst them are common uses of theword, which is today taken just to mean a 'dragon', but in times pastit has also been used to refer to 'Mellt Distaw' - (sheet lightning), and also 'Mellt Didaranau' - (lightning unaccompanied by thunder).

But the most interesting common usage of the word in earlier times, according to this authoritative dictionary, is 'Maen Mellt' the word used to refer to a 'meteorite'. And this makes sense, as the Welsh word 'maen' translates as 'stone', while the Welsh word 'mellt'translates as 'lightning' - so literally a 'lightning-stone'. That theancient language of the Welsh druids has words still in use today whichhave in the past been used to describe both a dragon and also ameteorite, is something that greatly helps us to follow the destructive'trail of the dragon' as it was described in early Welsh 'riddle-poems'.

This is especially true of the "Hanes Taliesin", ariddle-poem that is so full of astronomical terms it is obvious thatthey were deliberately used by the composer - but to what end? Couldthey have been used to encode a druidic astro-mythology that wasaccessible only to 'initiates'?

In the mid 6th. century A.D. the ancient Cymric empire of the nativeBritons, that at one time had stretched from Cornwall in the south toStrathclyde in the north, was rapidly diminishing. And it was at thistime that the bard who called himself Taliesin (radiant brow) firstread his riddle-poem, "Hanes Taliesin" ("The History ofTaliesin"), to King Maelgwn Gwynedd, who, like the bard, had been astudent of St Illtud at the ancient druid college, later calledLlanilltud Fawr, in Morganwg. Was King Maelgwn Gwynedd the only one inhis 6th century Conwy Eisteddfod who was meant to understand theriddle-poem?. Or was it also a gathering of initiates from all over theisland?

Of comparatively recent origin on the Welsh national flag, theassociation of the dragon with the country of Wales dates much furtherback - to the start of the European 'Dark Age'; the times of KingArthur and the enigmatic Merlyn, neither of whom have ever been provento be definitively mythical nor historical characters.

The exact nature and sequence of events in the mid-6th. century A.D.that gave rise to the period we refer to as the European 'Dark Age' isstill a matter for speculation amongst historians and archaeologists.Over the past 20 years or so, certain paleo-climatologists have beguncomparing notes with archaeologists and astronomers, and interestingly,in the absence of written records, many have begun to look a littlemore closely at mythology in their efforts to corroborate the findingsof their researches. While much of this recent bout ofinter-disciplinary brainstorming has focussed on the 6th.C. AD start ofthe European Dark Age, earlier dates are also of great interest tothose embroiled in this veritable 'paradigm shift'.

Archaeologist and Dendrochronologist, Mike Baillie, of QueensUniversity, Belfast, has compiled a '7,500-year tree-ring chronology'of Irish bog oaks, which offers an accurate picture of the weather on ayear-by-year basis throughout those millennia. His 1999 book, Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets,traces the history of cometary dust-trail activity from those epochs bythe indicators evident in 'narrowest tree-ring events'. And this hasbeen looked at in much greater detail over the past six years,culminating in his September 2005 book, The Celtic Gods: Comets in Irish Mythology, co-authored with QUB colleague, Patrick McCafferty.

Each year a tree puts on another ring, and the better the weatherpreferred by the tree, the wider the ring for that year. One of themost striking features of this most accurate of dating methodsis its ability to detect past climatic downturns evident in the narrowtree-rings that bunch together over several consecutive years -indicating poor annual growth and an environmental downturn.

Beginning in the year A.D. 536, and continuing through until A.D.545, the dendrochronology record reveals a dramatic 'narrowest-ringsevent' that is corroborated by some of the findings of the GreenlandIce Sheet Projects. There, a significant absense of any tell-talevolcanic 'acid spike' in the ice-cores record suggests an altogetherdifferent cause - dustloading of the stratosphere by minute particlesof dust and other cometary debris.

Climatologists and astronomers concur that this event bears all the hallmarks of a 'cosmic winter'scenario - when dust in the stratosphere blots out the Sun, loweringthe global temperature, hindering plant growth and in so doingundermining agricultural societies.

This has happened a number of times as a result of volcanic eruptions, but it can also result from 'dust-loading'of the stratosphere caused when the Earth's orbital path encounters thetrails of cometary debris that literally boils off the ice-and-rubblecomets as they approach the Sun on their journeys through our solarsystem. Indeed, recently, on September 3rd, 2004, a small asteroidwhich disintegrated in the stratosphere above Antarctica depositedsufficient micron-sized dust particles to cause 'local cooling, andmuch speculation as to the possible effects on the ozone layer.

Much of the make-up of comets is sub-micron dust along with frozenwater, methane and other gasses, as well as various organic molecules,pebbles, stones, and boulders of metal and rocks measuring from a fewfeet wide to bolides many miles in diameter. The dust in smallquantities burns up harmlessly as it enters the Earth's atmospheregiving rise to what we term 'shooting stars', with larger grains oftenproviding the most spectacular multiple 'fireball' displays. Muchdenser cometary debris trails can over-load the upper atmosphere with'dust veils', both locally and globally, causing 'cosmic winters'similar to those caused by volcanic activity, and nuclear war scenarios.

The larger rocks and boulders can bombard the Earth causing impact cratersthat throw their ejected debris up into the atmosphere with much thesame effect. While air-bursting meteorites can cause huge fireballs andintense blast waves that can devastate thousands of square miles aroundthe area of detonation, as happened in the Tunguska region of Siberiaon the 30th of June 1908.

In recent years certain astronomers have increasingly come toappreciate that encoded in the folklore and mythologies of manycultures are the accurate observations of ancient skywatchers. Almostall tell of times when death and mass destruction came from the skies,events that are often portrayed as 'celestial battles' between whatthey variously depicted as 'the Gods'. And curiously the imagery inthese 'myths' have many common features, even between the mythologiesof cultures widely spaced in time and location.

For example, in Appendix 1 of Basil Clarke's 1973 translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini("Life of Merlyn"), he comments on the Lailoken tales, and theparticular story of the encounter with St Kentigern. It is believedthat Lailoken and Merlyn were really the same character - Lailoken inthe Scottish tradition, and Merlyn in the Welsh. Having rushed out ofthe woods a naked and hairy madman, Lailoken/Merlyn is asked by StKentigern what has driven him to "...wander alone in this lonely placeand keep company with the beasts of the woods" [1].

He replies to St. Kentigern that he felt great guilt, because hebelieved he had been the cause of the many deaths resulting from thebattle of Arfderydd, saying:

"In that fight the sky began to split above me, and I heard a tremendous din, a voice from the sky saying to me, 'Lailochen,Lailochen, because you alone are responsible for the blood of all thesedead men, you alone will bear the punishment for the misdeeds of all.For you will be given over to the angels of Satan, and until the day ofyour death you will have communion with the creatures of the wood.'But when I directed my gaze towards the voice I heard, I saw abrightness too great for human senses to endure. I saw, too, numberlessmartial battalions in the heaven like flashing lightning, holding intheir hands fiery lances and glittering spears which they shook mostfiercely at me." [2]

In Welsh Merlyn is called Myrddyn, and the Welsh town of Carmarthenis called in Welsh, CaerFyrddyn, meaning 'the fortress of Merlyn'. Somefifteen miles or so northeast of Carmarthen is an oddly-named placecalled Llwyn Wormwood- odd because in Welsh there is a word for wormwood, 'wermod', andbecause this is in one of the least anglicised areas of rural Wales.

Another place called Llwyn Wormwood is situated just over 10 milesto the southeast, not far from the Welsh market town of Llandovery.Could these places shed any new light on the Merlyn 'vision' referredto in the Basil Clarke 1973 translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's "VitaMerlini" ("Life of Merlyn")? And more importantly, was the characterknown as Merlyn a witness to the mid-6th century event evident in the tree-ring record?

Since the spectacular events of July 16 1994, when the newlydiscovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which had split into more thantwenty pieces as it passed Jupiter in 1993, had returned to bombardJupiter's surface over the following few days, astronomers havespeculated nervously at the probable fate of our own civilisation hadthose impacts happened with planet Earth instead ...

The number of known impact craters on Earth is growing all the timeas satellite imaging technology advances, and the growing list ofimpact sites dated from the current inter-glacial period in which welive (the Holocene) leaves even the most ardent of catastrophistsceptics in no doubt that it has happened many times before - and it most certainly will again ...

Over the past decade or more, astronomers have taken ever moreseriously the very real threat from Earth-crossing asteroids and fromcometary debris trails. In January 2000 the British governmentcommissioned a report into the threat from Near Earth Objects (NEOs), the reportwas published in August 2000. The setting up of the commission ofenquiry was the result of continuous lobbying by a growinginter-disciplinary body of concerned astronomers, climatologists,archaeologists, anthropologists and geologists.

Certain of them have moved towards looking for the recollections of ancient bombardment events inthe mythologies and oral traditions of the world's many past cultures.These endeavours have brought to the surface many similar tales to thatof the 'Vision of Merlyn' described above, and in many geographically widespread cultures of the archaic world.

In particular, the collection of ancient Chinese astronomical observations contained in the wooden chronicle known as the "Bamboo Annals"have been shown to contain many details of comets, fireballs, andespecially planetary conjunctions, the accuracy of which can now beverified by the ability to re-create the ancient skies presented byrecent advances in computer technology. Some modern astronomers findthis ancient archive invaluable, and have been using it to correlatethe 'observations' made by the skywatchers of contemporary cultures inother parts of the world.

Likewise, the Sumerian cuneiform tablets have been shown to haveaccurately recorded these most terrifying of 'temporary celestialevents', while classical writings such as the "Epic of Gilgamesh", andnumerous passages from the "Old Testament", continue to be decoded insimilar astronomical fashion. In the "Book of Revelations" (Ch8 vs.10-11), there is mention of star named 'Wormwood', which makes thewaters bitter, creating a wasteland similar to the 'wastelands' ofArthurian legend. Many now believe that this was a reference to afuture encounter with a comet, whose past catastrophic encounters, and'periodic return', may have been well known to John of Patmos, theauthor of the "Book of Revelations".

The ancient Chinese depicted comets as 'fiery dragons' flying acrossthe sky. Increasingly, anthropologists, archaeologists and now alsoastronomers, are speculating that the 'plumed serpent' of the Aztecsand the Mayans, and the many tales of 'winged serpents' in thetraditions of numerous other ancient peoples, may also be referring tocomets or large asteroids that in the past had disintegrated in theupper atmosphere producing enormous 'fireballs', reminiscent of thespectacularly terrifying and destructive multiple bombardments of pastepochs. As the 'smoke trails' left by these fireballs begin to breakup, distorted by air currents in the atmosphere, they take on the eerieappearance of a snake - a veritable 'serpent in the sky'.

Victor Clube and Bill Napier, for the frontispiece plate of their ground-breaking book, The Cosmic Serpent,about the past and present threat to our planet from bombardments ofcometary debris, used a nineteenth-century French caricature of a comettearing the Earth apart. Along with it were the words:

Dis (evil) aster (star)

Despite their being two of the world's leading astro-physicists, inChapter 8 of the book they laid out the reasons for their comprehensivestudy of world mythologies, where they found numerous examples of 'cometary imagery' in the ancient myths of many peoples:

"The earliest recorded myths are those of combat, between a god orhero and a dragon. The dragon was a familiar figure in Greece, Egypt,Mesopotamia, Babylon, India, China, North America and elsewhere.Usually, he has the form of a winged serpent. He is a gigantic monster;he spouts fire and smoke; bellows and hisses; he throws rocks, and isthe creator or terrible destruction; and his home is in the sky." [3]

The description of the end of Atlantis given by Plato in the "Timaeus" and "Critias"dialogues bears striking resemblance to what many scientists are nowagreed would be the inevitable result of an oceanic impact by adisintegrating comet or large asteroid. The resultant 'tsunami',or tidal waves, would easily reach 2000 ft. high as they approachedland, wiping out any and all coastal settlements. The delugetraditions, of which there are literally hundreds worldwide, appear inthis light to be variations on Plato's account, and could even beactual observation-based tales, eye-witness accounts of the same, orsimilar, events.

Another good example of this is the 'myth' about the winged horse,Pegasus, who is said to have been conceived when his mother, the oncebeautiful Medusa, was overwhelmed in a tidal wave caused by the passionof Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea and storms. Exactly which'celestial event' this may eventually be shown to refer to is a matterfor conjecture, but possibly the most famous legend about Pegasus mightgive a lead.

Bellerophon was ancient Corinth's most famous hero, and he was setthe task of slaying the Chimera - a monster variously described ashaving 'the body of a goat, the tail of a dragon, and the head of a lion, which belched out sulphur, smoke and flames'. In order to help Bellerophon to overcome the Chimera, the goddessAthena gave him a golden bridle with which to tame Pegasus, which hethen rode across the skies to southern Turkey where the Chimera had hercave, not far from the modern border with northern Syria.

The constellation of Pegasus can be found in the northern sky abovePisces, in the direction of Andromeda, and there is evidence that thebright blue-white star, Markab, which marks the horse's shoulder, wasimportant to ancient skywatchers, as was the red giant star, Scheat,which marks the horse's leg. Whether the legend of Pegasus, Bellerophonand the Chimera is simply an invented folk tale as some would believe,or a descriptive observation of cometary activity in that part of theancient heavens, we will probably not know until astronomers produce aplausible model, retro-calculated for those times.

Another possible example of a temporary celestial event encoded inmythology, and one often quoted in this context, is the story of theconstellation Eridanus - known to the Babylonians as the 'river of the night'.This is one of the longest constellations in the sky, starting at thefeet of Orion, which can be seen in both hemispheres, and winding downalmost to the celestial South Pole. Only the stars Acamar and Zaurakcan easily be seen from northern latitudes, while Achernar, the ninthbrightest star in the heavens, can only be seen in the SouthernHemisphere. It is a blue giant star known as 'the end of the river',and is invisible even in the Mediterranean area.

It was commonplace in many ancient cultures to regard all celestialphenomena as having their earthly counterparts, and vice versa. So theBabylonians had their terrestrial River Eridanus, and in theirmythology, as with others in the Mediterranean area, Phaethon, thefoolish son of the Sun god, Helios, pleaded with his father to allowhim to drive his blazing chariot across the sky for one day:

"With the inexperienced hands of Phaethon on the reins, the Sun'sbright horses bolted through the heavens, scorching the Earth anddrying up the rivers. North Africa was turned into the Sahara, and tosave the universe, which would have been destroyed by flames, Zeusstruck Phaethon with a thunderbolt, and he plunged headlong, like ashooting star, into the waters of the Eridanus far below, his auburnhair aflame." [4]

There are many similar legends, oral traditions, and later writtenmythologies describing temporary celestial events in this manner. And,it is simply because these were 'temporary' celestial events that theywere regarded as important enough to be worth recording, and passing onto future generations, orally at first, then later in writing which wasinevitably 'encoded' from our modern perspective.

There is ample archaeological evidence that ancient peoples worldwide were preoccupied with events in the skies,and almost all the various megalithic structures that have survived thepast several millennia, on all continents, show remarkable degrees ofastronomical observation to have been considered in their siting andconstruction. Combined with the ancient traditions of 'death anddestruction coming from the skies', many of which appearcontemporaneous with the periods of the building of many of thesestructures, one possible motivation of the megalith builders could wellhave been to predict the imminent return of these periodic meteor storms and accompanying fireball events. The most likely of all motives being simply that of 'fear'.

The sheer terror at past bombardments,and the very real fear of future bombardments, would certainly havepreoccupied those societies that had experienced the destructiveness ofsuch catastrophic encounters. Given that astronomers and climatologistsnow concur such meteoritic bombardments and 'dust veils' can causeabrupt climate changes, cataclysmic earthquakes and tsunami, bringingfamine, pestilence and plague that can destroy whole civilisations, itis little wonder that there are ample indications in thedendrochronology records of numerous past events.

Yet there is sparse archaeological evidence available at present. Ormore likely the evidence exists but is not recognised as such byarchaeologists. This is due in no small part to the resistance withinthe archaeological community to attempts at the revision of currentmodels of prehistory that is called for in the light of this newinter-disciplinary approach to understanding the past in the context ofa 'catastrophically dynamic solar system history'. Regrettably, thereare still many in the archaeological community who continue to resistthe very idea that ancient peoples were competent skywatchers.Critics often point to obscure computer models purporting to show that,at some date or another, one celestial body or another will be seen torise or set at 'any' orientation in an easterly or westerly direction.

Sadly this misses the point altogether. Oral traditions, rituals andmythologies of many ancient cultures often focus on 'specific markerstars' and constellations, whose rising heralded the imminentsolsticial and equinoctial sunrises. The same is true of other starsand constellations that were of great significance to those particularcultures. But, much more importantly, when the major bombardments hadceased to be a regular occurrence, certain 'marker stars' and stargroups, for example The Pleiades, may well have signalled the rising ofthe 'radiants' of the greatly-feared daytime Taurid meteor storms, especially if they were the last feint stars to be seen just before sunrise.

But it is not only in mythology that we find hints of majortraumatic periods in the history of human civilisation. The chroniclersof old recorded troubled times at the very same epochs that thetree-rings tell their story of environmental downturns which haddramatic effects on human populations. The dendrochronology recordsshow narrowest-ring events at 3195 BC, 2345 BC, 1628 BC, 1159 BC,207 BC, and at AD 536-545 - the start of the 'European Dark Age'. Infact, many researchers in a variety of the historical sciences nowbelieve that the widespread and simulataneous collapse of Bronze Age societies around the worldcame about as a result of our planet's encounters with cometary debrisstreams, and the decoding of astronomical observations in themythologies of classical times is playing a major role.

Gildas, who was writing at approximately 540 AD, says that the island of Britain was on fire from sea to sea " ... until it had burned almost the whole surface of the island and was licking the western ocean with its fierce red tongue."[5] . While in "The Life of St. Teilo" contained in the Llandaf Charters, of St. Teilo, who had recently been made Bishop of Llandaf Cathedral in Morganwg, South Wales, it says:

" ... however he could not long remain, on account of the pestilence which nearly destroyed the whole nation. It was called the Yellow Pestilence,because it occasioned all persons who were seized by it to be yellowand without blood, and it appeared to men a column of a watery cloud,having one end trailing along the ground, and the other above,proceeding in the air, and passing through the whole country like ashower going through the bottom of valleys. Whatever living creaturesit touched with its pestiferous blast, either immediately died, orsickened for death ... and so greatly did the aforesaid destructionrage throughout the nation, that it caused the country to be nearlydeserted". [6]

St. Teilo is recorded as having left South Wales for Brittany toescape the Yellow Pestilence, and that it lasted for some 11 years. Itwas at this time that the Saxons returned, reportedly unopposed, intothe eastern areas of the 'Arthurian wastelands', begging the question,could the 'vision' of Myrddin (Merlyn) have been of a fiery comet -later depicted as a red dragon? Owen Morien Morgan's History of Walesgives the dates for the birth of St. Kentigern as AD 514, with hisdeath at AD 601. So it is quite plausible that 'Merlyn's vision' couldwell refer to a 'temporary celestial event' that was the cause of theclimatic downturn evident in the 'narrowest tree-ring' chronologies forAD 536 to 545.

The French archaeologist, Marie-Agnes Courty, presented a paper at the Society for Inter-Disciplinary Studies' July 1997 conference at Cambridge University,in which she first detailed the findings of excavations at a site innorthern Syria, at Tell Leilan. This was the first time ever that anarchaeological excavation had been initiated where the main purpose wasto examine the stratigraphical record of the area with a view tosearching for evidence of 'scorched earth' due to a suspected episodeof extra-terrestrial 'fireball bombardment'.

She and her team found much evidence of microscopic glass spherulestypical of melted sand and rock which is caused by the intense heatresulting from an asteroid impact or air-burst. She recommended furtherexcavations there and at other sites. It would make sense thatattention should be focussed on sites once occupied at dates where thetree-ring chronologies show evidence of abrupt climate changes - as atTell Leilan in northern Syria, where the 'burn event' has now beendated by Courty as immediately prior to 2345 BC, a 'narrowesttree-ring' date.

Another increasingly important criteria that should be consideredwhen defining ideal sites for conducting such excavations are thatthese could well benefit from being undertaken in areas where ancienttraditions tell of 'celestial battles between the gods', and/or are inthe areas where events such as the 'Merlyn vision' may have occurred.The problem, though, is one of adequately localising these myths, andidentifying appropriate sites of ancient settlement at specific datesindicated in the dendrochronology records to excavate.

One such site is St. Peter's Church on Mynydd Y Gaer (FortressMountain), in Morganwg, South Wales. An excavation at the church in1990 directed by Dr Eric Talbot, who for 22 years was head of GlasgowUniversity's Archeology Dept., uncovered evidence that human bones hadbeen found " ... melted onto the stones ... " [7]. St.Peter's Church is just 11½ miles from Llandaf Cathedral, but issituated atop one of the many mountains in South Wales, and they wouldhave taken the brunt of any cometary fireball bombardment, with thevalleys below possibly being devastated by heavy drifting clouds ofsulphurous gases (fire and brimstone?).

The resultant crop failures would have brought famine, massmigrations of the survivors, and outbreaks of diseases which couldeasily have reached plague proportions given that combination ofcircumstances. Certainly these events are remembered in the traditionsand folklore of the area.

Though little recognised now, this area of South Wales had been animportant administrative centre for quite some time before the Romanscame, and continued to be so up until the 'event' that gave rise to the'Yellow Pestilence' in the mid-6th century AD. It marked the seat ofthe Kings of Morganwg (called by the Romans, Siluria) - an area that atone time stretched from the river Severn in the east, to Caerfyrddyn inthe southwest.

But Morganwg was just one kingdom in a vast Cymric (Welsh) empire inearly Britain that at one time had reached as far as Strathclyde, wherethe Lailoken version of the 'Merlyn Vision' had its location. This'empire' had been jointly administered from Wroxeter, now on theWelsh/English border, as well as from sites in Morganwg to the south.So important had Wroxeter been prior to the Roman invasion, that aftercapturing it they built Watling Street directly to it.

Following the circa AD 540 'event', Wroxeter fell into disuse, asdid the sites in Morganwg. None of them ever recovered, and it wouldseem that if it was a bombardment of fireballs with cometarydust-loading the upper atmosphere that caused the death and destructionat the start of the European 'Dark Age', then it covered a vast area ofthe island of Britain. And, as this 'climatic downturn' is recorded inthe Irish and in the German bog-oak dendrochronologies, it is becomingapparent that the area affected covered a wide swathe of northwesternEurope as well - and probably even much further afield.

Astrophysicist, Victor Clube - whose books Cosmic Serpent and Cosmic Winter(co-authored with Bill Napier, now at Armagh Observatory) initiated therecent refocussing of astronomers on comets, asteroids, and especially dust-veilsof cometary debris - has recently put forward a new model for a dynamichistory of the solar system over the past 20,000 to 30,000 years. Atsome stage early on in this period they believe a giant comet enteredthe solar system, and after destabilising due to a sun-grazing orbit,was involved in a close encounter with the planet Mercury around 5,000years ago. This ended its sun-grazing status, and it broke up producingthe batch of meteoroid streams, or trails, known as the Taurid Complex. The orbital path of the Earth encounters this complex twice annually in June (daytime Taurids) and again in early November.

The postulated bombardments and dust-veils at around 3195 BC,another narrowest tree-ring date, would have wreaked havoc on both thelocal and global climate, and any and all cultures affected would havetaken many decades, maybe even centuries, to recover. The sheer terrorthat 'multiple-Tunguska-class fireballs' would have instilled into thepeoples of those times would have understandably motivated them towardsbuilding some form of observatories to help predict future meteorshowers/storms as a matter of perceived urgency.

Stage I of the building of Stonehenge - the bank and ditch 'henge'itself - began within about 150 years of this. The gap in the henge tothe north-east, as viewed from the centre, would have marked thedirection from where the comet Encke would have appeared to rise aroundthe Midsummer Solstice at that time. This theme was explored by thenoted astronomer, Duncan Steel, at the July 1997 IIS CambridgeConference. In the abstract of his paper entitled, "Before The Stones: Stonehenge I As A Cometary Catastrophe Predictor?", Dr Steel wrote:

"Astronomical hypotheses for the purpose(s) of megalithic monumentshave mostly been implicitly based upon an assumption that the designerswitnessed the same phenomena as those we observe in the sky today. Thisassumption is not well-based for phenomena having time-constants oforder centuries or millennia, such as the populations of comets andmeteoroids in the inner solar system and the ephemeral meteor showersand storms which they produce on the Earth. IRAS observations haveindicated that Comet Encke has a trail (not tail) of debris some tensof millions of kilometres long, presumably produced since its latestperiod of activity began about 200 years ago.

One may further presume that the Taurid meteor showers we observe inthis epoch are the result of the dispersal of trails produced inprevious activity cycles which must stretch back to about 20,000 yrago. When the comet, accompanied by such a trail, has a node close to 1AU, one expects intense meteor storms to occur, perhaps accompanied bymultiple Tunguska-type events if the disintegrating comet spawnsmassive lumps of debris.

Determination of the epochs of such events from backwardsintegrations is impossible due to (i) Chaotic orbital evolution; and(ii) Non-gravitational forces, but pairs of intersections (one at theascending node, the other descending) are to be expected a fewcenturies apart and separated by 2500-3000 years. It is suggested herethat one such pair occurred in 3600-3500 and 3200-3100 BC, provokingthe construction of the Great Cursus and Stonehenge I.

From Stonehenge I, apparently the first construction at the famoussite, as the comet neared the Earth it would have appeared to rise inthe evening with a huge bright stripe crossing much of the sky,originating in the north-east. Passage through the trail would thenresult in celestial fireworks (and maybe worse); afterwards the cometand trail would have passed in the direction of the Sun, partiallyblocking sunlight for a few days.

In order for terrestrial intersection to have occurred in that epoch(late fourth millennium BC) the mean orbital period of the comet overthe past 5,000 years would need to have been slightly less than atpresent, and might then be expected to have produced a 19 yearperiodicity in meteor storm events (six cometary periods).

It is suggested that Stonehenge I was built by the Windmill Hillpeople to allow the prediction of such events, from which they hid inthe shelters we now call long- and round-barrows, and that the laterdevelopments at Stonehenge (phases II and II) by the Beaker people werea result of a misinterpretation of the original purpose of the site interms of lunar and solar observations, a misinterpretation which wasre-discovered by Newham, Hawkins and Hoyle in the 1960's."

Meteor showers and storms are named after the constellations theyappear to emanate from, hence the Taurid meteors appear to emanate froma 'radiant' within the constellation of Taurus. According to theClube/Napier model, the Earth's last major Taurid Complex encounter wasbetween the two centuries A.D. 400 to 600.

If a comet, later depicted by various cultures around the globe as a'fiery dragon', did indeed enter the solar system at some stage duringthe past 30,000 years, it may well have broken up into several smallercomets, each leaving trails of debris comprising both sub-micron dustand bolides many miles in diameter. Given that some 71% of the surfaceof our planet is covered with shallow seas and deeper oceans, thelikelihood of oceanic impacts is much greater than that on dry land,and episodes of bombardment arising from this scenario are the likelyorigin of the many 'deluge' traditions that survive around the world.And, if this were the case, it would seem logical that from impactcraters and 'burnt earth' deposits in stratigraphic layers, the "trailof the dragon" can be successfully followed through many millennia.

Encouragingly, these trails can be followed not just by the study ofthese physical evidences alone, but also by a thorough re-investigationof astronomically-encoded,myths, legends and oral traditions of many past cultures. Furtheranalysis of the enigmatic astronomically-orientated megalithicstructures left by the survivors of those cultures that past celestial bombardmentshave left devastated, could also provide useful data about the areas ofthe sky to which those survivors paid particular attention. Predictingthe periodic returns of the comets and cometary debris trailsresponsible for the bombardments would have become the top prority -after immediate food and shelter needs, for any and all survivors ...

Aswarm with asteroids. In 2000, there were more than 86,000 known asteroids. By 2007, there were nearly 380,000, including main-belt objects that don't approach Earth (green); objects that approach but do not cross Earth's orbit (yellow); and objects that cross Earth's orbit (red).

TIESHAN TEMPLE NATIONAL FOREST, CHINA--In the control room of XuYiObservatory, Zhao Haibin sits at a computer and loads the night skyover Jiangsu Province. A faint white dot streaks across a backdrop ofpulsating stars. "That's a satellite," Zhao says. Elsewhere on thescreen, a larger white dot lumbers from east to west. It's a main-beltasteroid, circling the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

On a ridge in this quiet, dark corner of southeastern China, about100 kilometers northwest of Nanjing, XuYi's new 1-meter telescopeespies a few dozen asteroids on a good night. Most are known toscience. But since China's first telescope dedicated to asteroiddetection saw first light early last year, Zhao's team has discoveredmore than 300 asteroids, including a near-Earth object (NEO), the classof asteroids and comets that could smash into our planet, if fate wouldhave it.

China's asteroid hunters are the latest participants in apainstaking global effort to catalog NEOs. Close encounters withasteroids in recent years--and comet Shoemaker-Levy's spectacular deathplunge into Jupiter in 1994--have spurred efforts to find the riskiestNEOs before they blindside us. Tracking potentially hazardousobjects--NEOs passing within 0.05 astronomical units, or 7.5 millionkilometers, of Earth's orbit--is essential for any attempt to deflectan incoming rock.

The first test of our planet's defenses could be Apophis, anasteroid the size of a sports arena that made the world sweat for a fewdays in December 2004, when calculations suggested as great as a 1 in37 chance of an impact in 2029. Although further data ruled out thatday of reckoning, another could be looming. In April 2029, Apophis willpass a mere 36,350 kilometers from Earth, inside the orbits ofgeostationary satellites. If it enters a keyhole--a corridor of spacebarely wider than the asteroid itself where gravitational forces wouldgive it a tug--it will end up on a trajectory that would assure acollision 7 years later: on 13 April 2036, Easter Sunday. The odds ofApophis threading the needle are currently 1 in 45,000--but dozens offactors influence asteroid orbits. Researchers will get a better lookduring Apophis's next appearance in our neighborhood in 2012.

By then, a powerful new telescope for detecting asteroids andcomets--the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System(Pan-STARRS), expected to be up and running by summer--should haveunmasked thousands more NEOs. An even grander project, the 8.4-meterLarge Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), is expected to be operationalin 2014.

The anticipated bumper crop of NEOs confronts society with urgentquestions. In the next several years, with increasing rapidity,Pan-STARRS and its ilk will discover potentially dangerous NEOs.Currently, 168 NEOs have a chance of striking Earth in the nextcentury, although the odds are minuscule. By 2018, the risky rockroster could swell more than 100-fold. Additional observations willallow astronomers to refine orbits, and in most cases, rule out athreat. For that reason, astronomers are debating when the publicshould be alerted to hazards, to minimize false alarms.

Eventually, an asteroid with our name on it will come into focus,forcing an unprecedented decision: whether to risk an interdictioneffort. "The very concept of being able to slightly alter the workingsof the cosmos to enhance the survival of life on Earth is staggeringlybold," says Russell Schweickart, chair of the B612 Foundation, aSonoma, California, nonprofit that lobbies for NEO deflectionstrategies. We have the means to deflect an asteroid--indeed, "it'sreally the only natural hazard that we can possibly prevent," says NEOspecialist David Morrison, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames ResearchCenter in Mountain View, California.

There is one "fatal missing element," says Schweickart, who in 1969piloted the lunar module for the Apollo 9 mission: "There is no agencyin the world charged with protecting the Earth against NEO impacts." Heand others hope to change that.

Wake-up calls

Like any natural disaster, impacts occur periodically; gargantuanimpacts are so rare that their frequency is hard to fathom. Every 100million years or so, an asteroid or a comet a few kilometers or more inwidth--a titan like the rock thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65million years ago--smacks Earth. "This is not just getting hit andkilled," says Edward Lu, a former astronaut who now works for Google."You're on the other side of the Earth and the atmosphere turns 500°hotter. Lights out."

Reassuringly, no doomsday asteroid identified thus far is on trackto intersect Earth's orbit in the next century. Less reassuring, anunobserved, long-period comet from the Oort cloud could swoop in withlittle warning. Although the odds of this happening in anyone'slifetime are on the order of winning the Powerball lottery, amegaimpact's annualized fatality rate is likely to rival those ofearthquakes or tsunamis, says Clark Chapman, an astronomer at theSouthwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Near-Earth asteroids tens to hundreds of meters in diameter are farmore numerous-- there may be as many as 3 million in the solarsystem--and they cross Earth's path more frequently. The iconic MeteorCrater in northern Arizona was gouged by a 50-meter-wide hunk of ironand nickel 50,000 years ago. In 1908, a fireball scorched and flattenedtrees over 2100 square kilometers of taiga in Siberia's Tunguskaregion--the devastating footprint, many experts say, of a modestasteroid that exploded in midair.

Recent supercomputer modeling has downsized the Tunguska rock. Anasteroid just a few dozen meters wide, fragmenting explosively with ayield of 3 to 5 megatons--a fraction of earlier estimates--could havedone the trick, Mark Boslough and David Crawford of Sandia NationalLaboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, report in an article in pressin the International Journal of Impact Engineering. Ifthis is correct, the expected frequency of Tunguska-sized impactschanges from once every couple of millennia to once every couple ofcenturies. "Smaller objects may do more damage than we used to think,"says Chapman.

Today the impact threat may seem obvious, but for decades it waslargely ignored. Aerodynamicist Anatoly Zaitsev, director general ofthe Planetary Defense Center in Moscow, sounded the alarm in a landmarkreport delivered to Soviet leaders in 1986. "They just laughed," hesays. Then on 22 March 1989, an asteroid several hundred meters acrosswhizzed by Earth at about twice the distance to the moon; astronomersdidn't spot Asclepius until it had already passed.

Asclepius was a shot across the bow, prompting the U.S. Congress toquery NASA about whether the agency had a plan for the next killerasteroid. A parade of committees followed, after which Congress in 1998ordered NASA to tally and track at least 90% of NEOs that are more than1 kilometer wide. NASA launched the Spaceguard Survey, named after asurvey in Arthur C. Clarke's 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama. To date,Spaceguard and other efforts have identified more than 700 of anestimated 1000 or so NEOs in this category. Then in 2005, Congresscalled on NASA to expand the search by 2020 to cover 90% of NEOs atleast 140 meters in diameter--the approximate minimum size to damage anarea at least as large as a state or seaboard. NASA expects SpaceguardII to spot 21,000 potentially hazardous NEOs and forecasts a 1-in-100chance that such a rock will hit Earth in the next 50 years.

The uncertainties are huge. Main-belt asteroids can knock into eachother, turning a benign rock into a malignant projectile. And with onlya fraction of NEOs having been identified so far, what we don't knowcan hurt us. Astronomer Brian Marsden, director emeritus of theInternational Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, theclearinghouse for asteroid and comet orbits, figuratively sums up thesituation: "The ones to worry about are those that were discoveredyesterday and have a very high probability of hitting us the day aftertomorrow. Those, plus the ones we've never even seen yet!"

Drawing a bead

Night has fallen on an early December evening near Tieshan Temple,which, according to local lore, was the home of China's first monk. Thesky above the national forest is pitch-black but overcast. On nightslike this, asteroid hunters know how to kill time. In a chilly,cigarette smoke-filled lounge down the hall from XuYi's control room,Zhao and his colleagues play cards and sip from tall, clear plasticbottles packed with green tea leaves, hoping that the weather forecastis wrong and the skies will clear.

Zhao has worked at Purple Mountain Observatory, which operates XuYi,since graduating from Nanjing University in 1996. He has a comet namedafter him, but his biggest thrill came last spring, when he found anNEO.

On most nights, the telescope is pointed away from the sun, towardmain-belt asteroids outside Earth's orbit. More elusive objects betweenEarth and the sun can be discerned in the right conditions. With aclear sky and a new moon, just after nightfall or before sunrise, Zhaoaims the telescope at a 60° angle to the sun, where faint NEOs, like acrescent or gibbous moon, reflect sunlight in phases. During thetelescope's first year, his team got fewer than a dozen opportunitiesto gaze sunward. One was 7 May, when they scored their NEO.

Tonight, just after midnight, the clouds have dispersed enough forviewing. Zhao's team swings into action, pointing the telescope at a2-degree-square patch of sky. As dawn breaks, they will e-mail the datato Purple Mountain's Nanjing headquarters for analysis.

Zhao's team is working fast to stake NEO claims before Pan-STARRS,the first Spaceguard II facility, starts gobbling up the heavens. Thetelescope on Mount Haleakala on Maui Island, Hawaii, has acharge-coupled device camera with 1.4 billion pixels--the highestresolution in the world--that acquires images every 30 seconds.

Pan-STARRS, which saw first light last August, will usher in a new paradigm in observational astronomy (Science,12 May 2006, p. 840). "It's a set of surveys that will be analyzed in awealth of different ways," says Kenneth Chambers, an astronomer withthe Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaii, Manoa,who is leading a consortium of 300 scientists whose institutions havepaid for first crack at Pan-STARRS gold. Some will map the Milky Way orlook for distant quasars. Others will hunt for asteroids. "Theastronomical community is not ready for the fire hose of data that'sgoing to hit them," Chambers says.

Once Pan-STARRS begins taking data in earnest this summer, NEO findsshould come thick and fast. According to IfA astronomer Robert Jedicke,who led development of the software that will cull NEOs from the datadeluge, Pan- STARRS will be 10 times more effective at spotting NEOsthan all current surveys combined. "Are there many more objects likeApophis out there? This is something that Pan-STARRS will answer," saysIfA Director Rolf-Peter Kudritzki.

Magnificent feats of detection are also expected from LSST, whichwill have 24 times greater survey power than Pan-STARRS. Like itsHawaiian rival, the $389 million project has broad science objectives,including studying dark energy and dark matter and mapping the MilkyWay. Unlike Pan-STARRS, LSST data will be available immediately to anyresearcher. Construction is expected to begin in 2011 at Cerro Pachón,Chile.

When completed, LSST will cover the entire available sky every 4nights with a 3.2-billion-pixel camera. Project scientists have teamedup with Google, Microsoft, and others to develop algorithms forprocessing the masses of data. After 10 years of operation, LSST shouldhave plotted rough orbits for 82% of potentially hazardous NEOs largerthan 140 meters, with only the risk assessments requiring human input,says LSST Director J. Anthony Tyson, a physicist at the University ofCalifornia, Davis.

Funding is not assured. Tyson has lined up $45 million so far fromprivate sources, including two gifts announced in January that willhelp pay for the mirror: $20 million from Charles Simonyi, chiefexecutive of Intentional Software, and $10 million from Microsoft'sBill Gates. The tycoons, says Tyson, "are excited about the LSST actingas a peripheral device for the Internet and thus bringing the universeto everyone's computer." Much of LSST's construction funds are expectedfrom the U.S. National Science Foundation, which will hold a MajorResearch Equipment and Facilities Construction review on the projectthis autumn.

Gauging risks

In the early 1990s, as astronomers intensified their search forNEOs, IfA's David Tholen upbraided colleagues for turning a blind eyeto asteroids lurking inside Earth's orbit. He was concerned that aninner-orbit NEO at its farthest point from the sun could hit ourplanet. "For years, I wanted to do something about that," says Tholen.But he lacked the means. "Other folks had great cameras. I wasenvious." In 1997, he finally got time on a decent telescope. Aiming itlow on the horizon just after nightfall or before dawn, his group over3 years discovered four asteroids in this blind spot--including awhopper that is 5 kilometers wide.

Riding high, Tholen won a grant for a more intensive searchcampaign. But his team struggled with technical glitches, and by theirfinal year of funding in 2004, he says, "we hadn't found a singleasteroid." He redoubled his efforts, booking time at observatoriesaround the world. In June 2004, he was juggling nights on twotelescopes. Then in the early evening of the 18th, at Kitt PeakNational Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, Tholen, Roy Tucker, andFabrizio Bernardi hit pay dirt: They got a first glimpse of Apophis.

"Apophis demonstrated that we know very little about the region ofspace near Earth," says Boris Shustov, director of the Institute ofAstronomy in Moscow. Anxiety will mount when Apophis chugs back intorange in 2012. Ironically, the best instrument for refining theasteroid's orbit--the world's most powerful planetary radar at AreciboObservatory in Puerto Rico--may be switched off in 2011, the victim ofbudget cuts. Even without Arecibo, optical measurements almostcertainly will reduce or rule out the impact risk. For that reason,NASA has no plans to send a probe to Apophis, and the European SpaceAgency has shelved a mission (see sidebar, p. 1329).

A chilling reassessment of Apophis could change the political landscape fast.

Suppose that observations forecast a 1-in-1000 impact risk in 2036."That risk is really low, but if it hits, it's really bad," says Lu."How much is it worth to us to have peace of mind?"

The "threshold of pain," as Lu calls it, may depend on who would beaffected--and what resources they have. Based on current calculations,the line where Apophis might hit--the so-called risk corridor--runsfrom Kazakhstan through Siberia, over the northern Pacific, and acrossCosta Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, and the south Atlantic. Who wouldmount and pay for a deflection mission? All countries along thecorridor? Just Russia, vulnerable to a direct hit, or the UnitedStates, vulnerable to a towering tsunami? The United Nations? What if amission failed, deflecting Apophis to another point on the riskcorridor, converting an "act of God" into an act of humankind? Whowould be liable?

As experts grapple with these questions, some are trying to rousepolitical leaders. With outside advice, the Association of SpaceExplorers, an organization of astronauts and cosmonauts based inHouston, Texas, is drafting an NEO Deflection Decision Protocol topresent to the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in2009. "Apophis should unite our efforts to deal with the threat," saysShustov, who is leading an effort to develop Russia's first nationalR&D program on NEO hazards.

Shustov's nightmare is that leaders will drag their feet until thethreat of a direct hit becomes real. But an asteroid need not impact tocause chaos. Each year, military satellites detect several1-kiloton explosions of asteroids in the upper atmosphere, and everyseveral years, a much larger explosion of 10 kilotons or more, saysSandia's Boslough. "They are quite frightening to people on the ground."A bus-size meteoroid would explode in the stratosphere with the energyof a small atomic bomb, producing a blinding flash much brighter thanthe sun, says Chapman. "Military commanders in a region of tensionmight regard it as the hostile act of an enemy and retaliate," he says.A 25-kiloton airburst occurred over the Mediterranean Sea on 6 June2002. Imagine, Chapman says, "if that had happened instead in thevicinity of Kashmir, where tensions between India and Pakistan wereelevated."

While this scenario may argue for giving NEO sightings widepublicity, some experts think that detailed predictions--particularlyrisk corridors--should be withheld from the public. They want to avoida "Chicken Little" phenomenon of repeatedly sounding alarms that arelater downgraded or called off. NASA has not released Apophis's riskcorridor in 2036. (The B612 Foundation provided the diagramabove.) "We do not generally release these kinds of diagrams when theyrelate to future and ongoing risk assessments," says Steven Chesley, anNEO specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,California.

Others believe in full disclosure. "People don't like secrecy. Itbreeds distrust," says Chapman. "When the facts are finally revealed,people wonder whether to believe them and wonder about what else mightbe still under wraps." NEO impact forecasts, he says, should be treatedlike hurricane forecasts, allowing people to respond.

Like the first hurricane of the season, the first test of ourplanetary defenses may be an asteroid whose name starts with the letter"A."

Victims of a hit? Published evidence that an impact triggered the mammoths' disappearance is falling far short of proof.

It looked impressive as slide after data-laden slide flashed on thescreen last spring. Nearly a dozen debris markers, found at 26 sitesfrom the U.S. West Coast to Belgium, testified to a huge impactfollowed by a continent-spanning wildfire. The catastrophe had takenplace a geologic instant ago--closely coinciding with the disappearanceof North America's mammoths and the continent's earliest human culture (Science, 1 June 2007, p. 1264). Then came the 26-author paper last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),not to mention the hourlong National Geographic Channel documentaryrunning on cable since last October, with more coverage on the way fromthe History Channel and PBS's prestigious program NOVA.

Although cosmically blasted mammoths may make good copy, many impactspecialists have lately swung from leeriness to thorough disbelief."The whole thing is contrived," says geochemist and impact specialistChristian Koeberl of the University of Vienna, Austria. "Their datadon't agree with anything we know about impacts. It just doesn't makeany sense. Occam's razor has been put safely in a drawer somewhere."

One problem is that no one has "any of the classic evidence of animpact," says impact specialist David Kring of the Lunar and PlanetaryInstitute in Houston, Texas. Spurred by the 1980s debate over whatkilled off the dinosaurs, "the community learned a lot about what thethreshold of evidence is" for confirming an impact, he explains. Buttaking all the evidence offered by the group proposing themammoth-killer impact, "you end up with [markers] that are notdiagnostic of impact," says impact specialist Bevan French of theNational Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Proponents,meanwhile, are defending some of their published claims and givingground on others but promising ultimate vindication.

This published NMR peak is too wide and in the wrong place to be diamond, say researchers.

Diamonds not forever

Everyone agrees on one point at least. "Obviously, something reallyinteresting happened 13,000 years ago," as Kring puts it. It was 12,900years ago, to be precise, that a world staggering out of the last IceAge suddenly plunged back into a millennium of near-glacial climatebefore emerging into the current warmth. It was also aboutthen--emphasis on the uncertainties summed up by "about"--that themammoths and other great beasts disappeared from North America. And thePaleo-Indian Clovis culture vanished from the archaeological recordaround then, too.

The PNAS authors have a cosmic explanation for the coincidence ofclimate shift, extinctions, and cultural oblivion: A body or clump ofbodies from outer space ravaged North America. By exploding over oractually hitting the great ice sheet in the north, their reasoninggoes, the impactors could have shifted climate into the chill of theso-called Younger Dryas (YD) period. And the blast or blasts, as wellas the resulting continent-wide wildfire, would have sufficed to wipeout or at least seriously weaken man and beast.

Headed by nuclear chemist Richard Firestone of Lawrence BerkeleyNational Laboratory in California and retired geophysical consultantAllen West of Dewey, Arizona, the 26 PNAS co-authors present what theyargue is debris from the impact: metallic bits, an abundance of theexotic element iridium, nanodiamonds, and molecular "buckyballs" filledwith extraterrestrial helium. And the wildfire would have leftcharcoal, soot, carbon spherules, and glasslike carbon. Along with theimpact debris, these components appear in a thin layer ofsediments--the YD boundary layer--that was laid down near the beginningof the cold snap and the end of the mammoths.

That sort of litany impressed the largely nonexpert crowd at lastMay's Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) inAcapulco, Mexico, but the few experts there were nonplussed. Now, inthe wake of the detailed PNAS paper, the experts are able to take amore critical look. For starters, they are pointing out that thecarbon-rich debris says nothing about the cause of the fires. Firehappened back then, notes geologist Nicholas Pinter of SouthernIllinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, especially once humansarrived. Critics are equally quick to set aside the helium-filledbuckyballs or fullerenes reported in the PNAS paper by geochemist LuannBecker of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).Throughout a half-dozen years of effort, no one else has replicated theisolation of fullerenes with helium (Science, 14 May 2004, p. 941).

Then there are the nanodiamonds. Zillions of diamond bits a fewnanometers in size sound exotic enough. Many meteorites are filthy withthem, so the impactor could have brought them in. Nanodiamonds have infact been reported in the debris of the dinosaur-killing impact 65million years ago.

At the AGU meeting, paleoceanographer and PNAS third author JamesKennett of UCSB reported that UCSB colleagues had "conclusively" shownthe presence of nanodiamonds in sediments from the YD boundary layer.They used transmission electron microscopy (TEM), the gold standard fornanodiamond identification. However, no TEM results appeared in thePNAS paper. Instead, a sample of glassy carbon recovered from the YDboundary had been sent to a commercial laboratory for analysis usingcarbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The NMR analysis showedthat the "sample contains nanodiamonds, which are inferred to beimpact-related material," the paper states.

Experts asked to comment on the findings disagree. "Their NMR datado not provide evidence for nanodiamonds," says geochemist George Codyof the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory inWashington, D.C., who in 2002 was the first to use NMR to identifynanodiamonds in meteorites. "I would never have claimed that [their NMRspectrum] had anything to do with nanodiamonds."

Under the proper analytical conditions, says Cody, nanodiamondsproduce a narrow NMR peak centered at a chemical shift of 34 parts permillion. The PNAS spectrum is broad and centered at 38 parts permillion, too broad and too far afield to be nanodiamonds, he says. Inany case, the analytical conditions used were wrong for detectingnanodiamonds, Cody adds; no peak would have appeared even if they werethere.

Mundane metals?

Another claimed marker of the YD impact--the element iridium--iscoming under attack as well. An iridium "spike" was the first clue toidentifying the impact that caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) massextinction 65 million years ago. The metallic element is scarce inEarth's crust but relatively abundant in meteorites, so likenanodiamonds, any excess might have arrived via asteroid or comet.

Firestone and colleagues reported elevated iridium of a few partsper billion (ppb)--comparable to K-T sediments--in some sedimentsamples from the YD boundary but not in sediments above or below. Theyfound tens to more than 100 ppb of iridium in microscopicparticles--both rough grains and once-melted spherules--magneticallyseparated from some of those sediments. And they cite an earlier reportin Nature of "large increases" in iridium "during the Younger Dryas asrecorded in the GRIP (Greenland) ice core." The iridium came frombeyond Earth in an impactor, the group concluded.

Other researchers aren't sure where the iridium came from, if it'sthere at all. As to the ice core record, "I was surprised to see suchan interpretation of our results in Nature," says Paolo Gabrielli,first author of the Nature paper and now at Ohio State University inColumbus. "My paper does not report any large increase of iridium inthe Younger Dryas. So it has nothing to do with an extraterrestrialimpact." Firestone disagrees: "I interpret his results differently thanhe does."

This published NMR peak is too wide and in the wrong place to be diamond, say researchers.

Impact specialist Philippe Claeys of the Free University of Brusselsin Belgium can't find any iridium at all in the four sediment samplesof the YD boundary West sent him for analysis. The PNAS groupeventually reported that two of the samples contained elevated iridiumeasily detectable by Claeys's method; the magnetic fraction of thethird sample had extreme iridium concentrations. But Claeys reported toWest that he could detect no iridium higher than 0.5 ppb in any of thesamples. West blames the "nugget effect," in which a few microscopicsediment particles highly enriched in iridium account for most of theiridium in an analyzed sample; samples that happen to have few nuggetslook barren. Claeys, however, says he intentionally used large enoughsamples to avoid the nugget effect.

Archaeologist Vance Haynes, professor emeritus at the University ofArizona, Tucson, is finding likely looking magnetic spherules in thedarnedest places. He has spent 30 years studying Clovis sites, many ofwhich the Firestone group sampled. As a check on his own ongoingindependent analysis of YD samples, he collected a modern sample. "Igot 300 grams of dust off the roof [of my house], and it's full ofmagnetic microspherules," he says. Whether they are the melted,iridium-rich micrometeorites that continually drift down from the upperatmosphere or the product of high-temperature industrial processes suchas coal burning, he doesn't yet know. Either way, they could betrouble. The cosmic dandruff of microspherules could have saltedsediments forming 12,900 years ago with iridium, while the humanmadevariety might have settled on modern outcrops before sampling.

Comment: But what Firestone, et al., discovered was that the microspherules uncovered in the Clovis sites were not exposed in modern outcrops, so this argument is bogus.

Chemical analyses of the magnetic particles do not point to impact,Koeberl says. The elemental analyses make little geochemical sense, hesays. In particular, the magnetic particles are far too rich intitanium to be extraterrestrial. He rejects the suggestion in the PNASpaper that such odd geochemistry points to "a new and unknown type ofimpactor." Meteoriticist Theodore Bunch of Northern Arizona Universityin Flagstaff, the fifth PNAS author, agrees that the magnetic fractionhas problems. What its chemistry means, "I don't know," he says,speaking for himself. In any case, "it detracts from the main thing."

The main thing now is nanodiamonds, according to Bunch and otherPNAS authors. The initial UCSB detection of nanodiamonds came too latefor their paper, says Firestone. Now West is using TEM and has foundthree different types of nanodiamonds in the YD layer but failed tofind any above or below it. "Some people just can't stand the idea ofsomething falling out of the sky," he says, but "they can't explain allof these [impact] markers, and diamond is the hardest to explain away."

West and colleagues expect to publish on nanodiamonds, but theircritics are still waiting to be impressed. Pinter and Scott Ishman, hismicropaleontologist colleague at SIU, wrote in a detailed critique inthe January issue of GSA Today that such "spectacular stories toexplain unspectacular evidence consume the finite commodity ofscientific credibility." The problem, Pinter says, is that "there's awide fringe beyond the impact community" where the criteria for impactidentification laid out in the literature are not rigorously followed.Whether another try at nanodiamonds will meet the standard is anybody'sguess.

Comment: TheAmerican uniformatarianist school of climate change is clearly on thedefense. What's missing from this critique is the complete lack ofattention to obvious secondary impact craters dating to 12,900 yearsBP: the Carolina Bays.

As for Gabrielli's comment, one can judge the data from his paper for oneself (click image to enlarge):

Clearly, there is a spike around 12,900 years (first peak from theleft in the shaded area. The graph is log-linear). Note also theincreased depositional flux throughout the ice age and recallastronomer Victor Clube's talk:

You first take the modern sky accessible to science, especiallyduring the Space Age, and you look at its' darker debris with a view torelating its behavior to the more accessible human history which wecan, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discoverfrom the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about thata huge comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago,whose dense meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly producedthe last Ice Age.

What glows orange, scours the skyline and leaves a black plume of smoke?

Annette Van Zetten is not exactly sure what she saw shooting acrossthe Tweed skyline on Wednesday evening, but it certainly grabbed herattention as well as the police and rescue authorities.

The Kingscliff woman was home entertaining friends about 5.30pm whenshe saw a bright orange object, seemingly not far from her PacificStreet home.

Fearing a plane was in trouble, Mrs Van Zetten's friend, GregSwaney, called police, who immediately began searching the area withthe aid of a crew from the RACQ CareFlight helicopter.

Mrs Van Zetten said she was sitting on her back deck when she spotted the unidentified flying object.

"It just sort of looked like an orange glow," she said. "The shape of it was like a flying saucer.

"It didn't look like a plane. It was definitely going down and thenwe saw black smoke so that's when we thought perhaps a plane was onfire."

Ms Van Zetten said it was hard to judge exactly how large or how far away the object was.

"We don't know how big it was. We thought maybe it was about 10km (away), maybe around Cabarita. It was hard to tell."

As airfields and airports in the region began accounting for theiraircraft on Wednesday night, police received reports of furthersightings of the orange glow.

With no reports of missing aircraft, the helicopter search was called off after about half an hour.

Police from Kingscliff, Tweed Heads, Murwillumbah and Byron Baycontinued looking for any sign of the object before the search wascalled off.

Sergeant Rob Taylor of Tweed Heads police said it was likely anobject had streaked across the sky on Wednesday. "There is somecredibility given that a few people have reported seeing something," hesaid. He said police were fairly confident the object was not a planebut that it may have been a meteor.

"We've got no craters or anything like that," he said.

Byron Bay police conducted an early morning search of bushland near the beach yesterday morning, with no results.

Sydney Observatory astronomy educator Mel Hulbert said althoughthere was no record of major meteor activity on Wednesday night, thelight in the sky over Kingscliff was likely to have been caused by atype of meteor known as a bolide.

"There are a couple of meteor showers that are running at the moment, but neither of them peaked yesterday," she said.

"Probably what we've seen is a bolide. A bolide is just a largerpiece of debris. Meteors are generally not that big. Most of the oneswe see are about dust grain-sized.

"Usually most of the meteors that we see burn up completely. Havingsaid that, we estimate that we get a rock fall to Earth once every twohours."

Dick Pugh enthralled about 50 people Tuesday night with hispresentation on the fireball that lit up the sky on the morning of Feb.19.

Adults and children crowded into the children's section of thePendleton Public Library to hear Pugh, a scientist with the CascadiaMeteorite Laboratory. He provided the latest facts on the meteor andgave suggestions about how to find pieces of the space rock.

Pugh will hold another presentation at 7 tonight at the Hermiston Public Library, 235 E. Gladys Ave.

Pugh began by showing a few photos of the fireball that came downover southeast Washington and northeast Oregon about 5:30 a.m. on Feb.19. Pugh said it probably weighed between one and two tons, came downto earth at 13 miles per second and exploded two or three times -between 15 and 25 miles above the ground. He said people saw thefireball in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and northernCalifornia and British Columbia and Alberta, Canada.

"It was a very bright object," he said. "It's the brightest fireball we've had since 1987."

The breakup of the meteorite caused sonic booms from Arlington to Lewiston and from Walla Walla to Baker, he said.

"The explosion was equal to 50 tons of TNT," Pugh said. "So it was apretty good bang. And you're in the Pendleton area where some folkswere literally bounced out of bed by it."

Some of the meteor pictures came from Providence Hospital inPortland, 250 miles from where the fireball actually broke up. He alsoshowed a video from the National Guard Armory in Boise. He played thevideo on a projector to the "oohs" "aahs" and chuckles of the crowd.

"Coming in ... bang! ... bang!" he said, narrating the video.

"We had people out. I think poor old Helix took it the hardest," hecontinued. "We had people who were sound asleep and the blinds werepulled. And all of a sudden the inside of the rooms got so bright youcouldn't even tell where the walls were. You sit up and start to get upand wonder, 'What the heck was that?' - and the sonic boom almostknocks you out of bed."

Pugh said the February fireball probably produced a strewn field,where large pieces of the meteorite land at one end and little piecesat the other. The strewn field is usually about 10 miles long and 5miles wide.

"What I'm hoping for is somebody got one through the barn roof," hesaid. "If you're anywhere up on the west side of the Blues, this thingblew up 20 to 25 miles up. There could be pieces on both sides of theBlue Mountains. If Tollgate is ground zero ... you could have rocks allthe way from Weston to Elgin. Look for holes in the roof."

Pugh also went over other fireballs and meteors hitting the Earthover the last century. He told stories about Oregon's four meteorites,including the most famous, the Willamette Meteorite. He also coveredthe different types of meteorites - iron, stony and stony irons - andhow to identify them.

The fireball that streaked over Eastern Oregon sparked interest inthe audience and they had many questions for Pugh after he finished histalk.

One child asked how much a meteorite would be worth. Pugh said asmall, fist-sized piece would be worth several thousand dollars.

"But where there's one, there's more," Pugh said. "If that thingweighed between one and two tons coming in, there's probably a ton ofthis stuff laying out there, somewhere. It could be anywhere from theUmatilla Reservation clear across the top - I suppose as far east asEnterprise."

He also had a homework assignment for those in the audience.

As the weather dries out, he said people should take a magnet, putit in a plastic baggy and drag it over the dripline of their barnroofs. Because meteorites are magnetic, they will stick to the magnet.

The LaGrande Observer has a story where Dick Pugh, PSU prof and celestial expert extraordinaire, suggests where the bits ended up.

Pugh, who is with Portland State University's Cascadia MeteoriteLaboratory, believes the meteorite hit somewhere between Tollgate andElgin. He said its fragments could be as far east as the mouth ofLookingglass Creek and as far south as Summerville.

The meteorite's fragments hit with such velocity they could have easily punched golf ball-sized holes in roofs.

The meteorite's pieces could be as large as a basketball or as smallas BBs. They will have a fusion coating created by their explosiveentry into the atmosphere. Just below the thin fusion coating therock's color will likely be significantly different, Pugh said.

The fusion coating will range in color from brownish black to greenish black.

Scientists at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Telescope, run by CornellUniversity, found a rare asteroid last month with two moons only sevenmillion miles from Earth - a breakthrough for a facility in the midstof serious budget woes.

Michael Nolan, research associate and head of radar astronomy atArecibo, said the facility was the first in the world to findextrasolar planets and to develop a three dimensional map of howgalaxies are distributed in the universe. Still, NASAcompletely cut off funding to the facility in 2004, and the NationalScience Foundation has refused to step up its funding in the meantime.

Nolan said Arecibo's budget is now $12.5 million per year, but it will be cut 10 percent in 2009, and 40 percent by 2011.

"There's no way we can operate with that amount of money unless we can find someone else to give us some," he said.

"The only really identifiable program that you could shut down andsave money, short of shutting the whole telescope down, is probably theplanetary radar program, because it makes use of large amounts of powerand big transmitters and generators," Campbell said.

Nolan said the bill would help Arecibo remain operational.

He said a shut down of the telescope would hurt Cornell's researchabilities because the telescope is a major source of information forthe astronomical community. He also said he would not be able to usethe information the telescope provides in his classes anymore.

"It would make me a less interesting lecturer ... ," he said. "Italk to the class about some of the things we do and show pictures ofthe asteroid."

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Cal., a member of the House Committee onScience and Technology, has co-sponsored a bill in a bi-partisan effortto appeal to NASA and the NSF to keep Arecibo running. He is sponsoringthe bill with Luis Fortuna, resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, anonvoting member of the House of Representatives.

Tara Setmayer, communications director for Rohrabacher, said thebill will ask for the NSF to fully fund Arecibo, allowing scientists tocontinue their work in radio astronomy and solar system research. Itdoes not specify exactly how much funding should be set aside.

The bill also calls for cooperation between NASA and the NSF.

Daniel Lamb, congressional representative for Rep. Maurice HincheyD-N.Y., said Hinchey is one of the 20 members of Congress who haveco-sponsored the bill, which has been in the House Subcommittee onSpace and Aeronautics since October.

Nolan said Arecibo receives some of the lowest funding compared toother observatories in the U.S. The National Optical AstronomyObservatories in Arizona got more than $38 million last year, and theNational Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico received more than$44 million last year.

Nolan said the Arecibo telescope gathers data rather than taking pictures of the asteroid. Hesaid scientists bounce radio waves off the asteroid and then use thedata they obtain to find out the rock's mass, density, orbit and otherfeatures.

"You send out a narrow pulse and first it bounces off the front ofthe asteroid," he said. "And then a few microseconds later it bouncesoff a piece farther away, and so we can sort of patch that backtogether and make these images."

Cornell research associate Ellen Howell said as the asteroid spins,astronomers make a two-dimensional image of it on their computers.

Howell said Arecibo's capabilities are unique, because it can reactquickly to new discoveries by approving urgent proposals for additionalobservation.

"Sometimes in as little as three or four hours, we can change theschedule, get all the right people assembled and get the telescopegoing," Howell said.

Howell said she and her colleagues had been planning to lookat the near-Earth asteroid, known as 2001 SN263, for a while. She andother astronomers thought it was simply a large rock and did notrealize it has two moons.

"We didn't know there was anything special about it until we got the first images," she said.

Nolan said the main rock in the asteroid's system is 2.7 km indiameter, or about 1.5 miles. Howell said the largest moon is half thatsize, and the smaller moon is 1000 m in diameter.

Howell said the triple asteroid is the closest one to Earthastronomers have ever found, though they have seen binary asteroids,with only one moon, close to Earth before.

The discovery raises many questions for Howell and herfellow astronomers, such as whether this triple system is stable andwhether it formed as a three-part asteroid or picked up the third rocklater.

Setmayer said Rohrabacher believes maintainingArecibo is vital to national security, since its use of radar makes ituniquely suited for finding potentially dangerous near-Earth objects.

"It doesn't look for things, it tracks them, and it tracks them witha level of precision that no other telescope can do," Setmayer said.

Howell said the triple asteroid poses no threat to Earth, butstudying it might give scientists a chance to learn more about thepotential hazards of asteroids.

"Studying the asteroid may also help astronomers learn more aboutthe earth's origins," Nolan said. "The reason we care about this is,these are the things that made the planets," he said. "To understandhow the Earth formed, it helps to know what it's made of."

Almost a century ago, on June 17 (30), 1908, a massive explosionoccurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, in what is now Russia'sKrasnoyarsk Territory, Central Siberia.

The residents of the Vanavara trading post, 65 kilometers (40 miles)south of the blast site, later claimed that the ground trembledviolently when attacked by a huge ball of fire, followed by a terriblestorm that destroyed everything in its wake.

The explosion was most likely caused by the airburst of a largemeteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5-10 kilometers (3-6miles) from the Earth's surface. Studies have yielded varying estimatesfor the object's size, with most experts agreeing that it measuredseveral dozen meters in diameter.

Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons to ashigh as 30 megatons of TNT, with 10-15 megatons being the most likelyyield. The blast, about 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshimabomb, felled an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 squarekilkometers (830 square miles). The earthquake caused by the blastmeasured 5.0 on the Richter scale. The region has never completely recovered.

The Tunguska blast was the largest meteoroid impact in the Earth'srecent history, and demonstrated the awesome destructive power ofnear-space objects. An explosion of the scale of the one in Tunguskacould destroy large metropolitan areas. It is this possibility that hashelped to spark discussion of asteroid deflection strategies.

Due to the rotation of Earth, if the collision had occurred4 hours 47 minutes later, it would have completely destroyed theImperial Russian capital, St. Petersburg. A little later still, and theTunguska meteorite would have wreaked chaos and destruction in denselypopulated Europe. Although scientists have advanced over 80theories explaining the Tunguska event, none of them offers anyconclusive evidence. Moreover, it is now impossible to verify them.

When I became an astronomer 30 years ago, I believed that themystery of the Tunguska meteorite would never be solved. However,astronomers have since then obtained additional information about theorigin of celestial bodies, and can offer more convincing explanationsfor the Tunguska blast.

I am going to tell an upcoming international conference in Moscow tomark the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event that it was mostlikely caused by a comet fragment consisting of the Solar System'sprimary matter.

There are two kinds of comets in our Solar System. "Primary" cometsconsist of micron-sized inter-stellar dust and gas, whereas "secondary"comets feature meteorite substance. A disintegrating "secondary" cometforms the meteor showers that are frequently observed from the Earth.Some of their fragments do not burn up during reentry and can berecovered. On February 12, 1947, a large meteorite disintegratedspilled fragments over a 1.3-sq. km. area in the Sikhote-Alin range,some 440 km from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. Subsequentexpeditions recovered many iron fragments there.

The Astronomy Institute's experts and I believe that if the Tunguskameteorite were a "secondary" comet, then it would have containedseveral metric tons of meteor substance, and some of it could have beenrecovered.

It would be therefore logical to assume that the Tunguska meteoritewas a huge gas-and-dust snowball, whose tiny fragments vaporized afterhitting the terrestrial atmosphere. The remaining comet-nucleus alsovaporized instantly, causing the loud and powerful air burst that wasregistered by many observatories all over the world.

The Tunguska meteorite was a milestone in terrestrial history,highlighting the dangers posed by killer asteroids. The other two knownlarge meteorites that fell in the sparsely populated Sikhote-Alin rangeon February 12, 1947 and on August 13, 1930 in the Brazilian Amazonasregion (approximately latitude 5° S. and longitude 71.5° W.), near thePeruvian frontier, caused no substantial damage.

Such narrow escapes are either a coincidence, or God's Providence.At the same time, we know very little about meteorites falling into theworld's oceans.

With the onset of the Space Age, humankind realized that the Earthwas under constant threat from celestial bodies. Asteroid-and-cometstudies have soared in popularity as people have become aware thatthese space objects have the capability to wipe out human civilization.Even now, numerous near-Earth satellites designed to detectballistic-missile launches or unauthorized nuclear tests annuallyregister 10-15 airbursts equivalent to a megaton of TNT. Mostscientists believe that these explosions are the result of mini-cometsburning up in the atmosphere.

Although we still lack the technology to deflect approachingasteroids and comets, we can watch the skies and evacuate thepopulation of threatened areas in case of an impending strike.

Hollywood films notwithstanding, it would be unforgivably dangerousto use weapons to destroy an incoming asteroid. The resulting fragmentscould cause at least as much damage as the original object. Probablythe best solution would be to land a small rocket on the asteroid'ssurface, exerting just enough force to gently change its trajectory.This would be far less spectacular, but could save thousands of lives,as well as humankind's material and spiritual heritage.

Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Alexander Bagrov, is aleading research associate of the Astronomy Institute of the RussianAcademy of Sciences.

Why do some of the closest bright stars to the solar system lie infront of the bright stars of the winter Milky Way? This foreground andbackground have nothing to do with each other, but they combine to makeour winter evening sky especially starry-bright.

Why, from Earth's viewpoint, do planets shine just about as bright as the brightest stars?

Why are the apparent sizes of the Moon and Sun so nearly alike?They're just right to give us the most spectacular-looking (if ratherrare) total solar eclipses.

On the evening of March 5th, big dim Comet Holmes was passing big dim NGC 1499, the California Nebula in Perseus. For this image Dennis di Cicco took 30-minute exposures through blue and green filters and a 50-minute exposure through a red filter, using a 5-inch Tele Vue NP127is refractor and an Apogee U16M CCD camera. Click image for larger view. (Look carefully at the large view and you'll see the faint nucleus of the comet as a tiny red-green-blue streak; it moved between the three exposures.) The field is roughly 3° tall, with north up.

You might think there was some sort of astronomical trickery goingon, if you didn't know the real reason. Our brains are hard-wired tooverinterpret. That is, we err on the side of seeing patterns andmeanings where none exist, rather than the other way around. For goodevolutionary reasons. It was a lot safer in the jungle to mistake apattern of shadows for a tiger than to mistake a tiger for a pattern ofshadows. For millions of years, those who erred on the side ofover-interpreting tended to live longer, and have a chance to reproduceand become your ancestors, so you carry their brain structures. Andtherefore even today, your child sees a heap of laundry in the nightand screams that he sees a crouching monster.

And on a happier note, we interpret the random scatterings of starsin the sky as fairytale people and animals, objects and heroes, eachwith a made-up story.

For the next several days there's a very photogenic coincidence inthe sky that's no illusion. Comet Holmes is passing the big, dimCalifornia Nebula in Perseus. (Ever wonder why we map-reading creaturessee a California in space?)

Last night S&T's Dennis di Cicco took the picture above. Bothobjects are much too dim to show their colors to the eye, even in arich-field telescope. In fact, they're so dim that they may beinvisible to the eye altogether. But the color contrast is real, as thecamera shows.

The comet is moving so slowly across the sky (from right to left inthe image) that it will remain near the California Nebula through aboutnext Wednesday, March 12th. (See chart.) Astrophotographers take note.

Astronomers from The University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, have captured rare video of a meteor falling to Earth.

The Physics and Astronomy Department at Western has a network ofall-sky cameras in Southern Ontario that scan the sky monitoring formeteors. Associate Professor Peter Brown, who specializes in the studyof meteors and meteorites, says that Wednesday evening (March 5) at10:59 p.m. EST these cameras captured video of a large fireball and thedepartment has also received a number of calls and emails from peoplewho actually saw the light.

Brown along with Wayne Edwards, a post doctorate student, hope toenlist the help of local residents in recovering one or more possiblemeteorites that may have crashed in the Parry Sound area of Ontario,Canada.

"Most meteoroids burn up by the time they hit an altitude of 60 or70 kilometres from Earth," says Edwards. "We tracked this one to analtitude of about 24 kilometres so we are pretty sure there are atleast one, and possibly many meteorites, that made it to the ground."

Edwards says the lab can narrow the ground location where themeteorite would have fallen, to about 12 square kilometres and havecreated a map that may assist in locating the meteorite. The rock, orrocks, would probably weigh a kilogram or slightly more.

"We would love to find a recovered meteorite on this one, because wehave the video and we have the data and by putting that together withthe meteorite, there is a lot to be learned."

A small meteorite that recently landed in a village in Muğla'sFethiye district will be analyzed by the Mining Exploration Institute(MTA), stated an official from the region.

Fethiye Deputy District Governor Halil İbrahim Çomaktekin reportedthat the meteorite fell in the Türbe neighborhood of Yaka Village aftera making a thunderous noise. "The muhtar [head] of the village calledand informed us, saying that the meteorite was black. He is going tobring it to the city center for analysis. We'll have it analyzed by theMTA," Çomaktekin added.

A resident of Yaka said he heard a loud roaring noise at around11:20 a.m. on the day the meteorite fell, sounding as if "a plane hadcrashed."

"We were amazed to find such a small stone after thatthunderous sound. It was black and about 40 centimeters in diameter,weighing three kilograms at most," another said, adding that themeteorite opened a small crater in the ground and created a cloud ofdust.

Residents of some neighboring villages rushed over immediately afterhearing the sound, and eventually the black meteorite was found inHacıekiz's field.

Astronomers at the University of Western Ontario are askingresidents near the Central Ontario town of Parry Sound to help findmeteorites that may have recently fallen in the area.

The astronomers have captured rare video of a meteor streaking through the Earth's atmosphere.

They are hoping people in the area can help recover one or more possible meteorites that may have hit the ground.

Associate professor Peter Brown, who specializes in the study ofmeteors and meteorites, says cameras captured video of a large fireballon Wednesday at 10:59 p.m.

He also says the department has received a number of calls and e-mails from people who saw the bright light in the sky.

Prof. Brown and postdoctoral student Wayne Edwards are now trying tofind people who are willing to help search for the fallen meteorites.

"Most meteoroids burn up by the time they hit an altitude of 60 or 70 kilometres from Earth," Dr. Edwards said.

"We tracked this one to an altitude of about 24 kilometres, so weare pretty sure there [is] at least one, and possibly many meteorites,that made it to the ground."

Dr. Edwards said his lab has narrowed the location where themeteorite would have fallen to about 12 square kilometres, and it hascreated a map to help in the search.

The rock, or rocks, would probably weigh a kilogram or slightly more.

"We would love to find a recovered meteorite on this one, because wehave the video and we have the data, and by putting that together withthe meteorite, there is a lot to be learned," Dr. Edwards said.

Meteorite scientist Dick Pugh says Chicken Little may have had a point: The sky really is falling. Well, part of it, anyway.

At a recent talk here he urged people to look to their rooftops forpieces of the fireball that came thundering down on northeast Oregon at5:31 a.m. on Feb. 19.

Pugh, with Portland State University's Cascadia MeteoriteLaboratory, says he thinks it hit between Tollgate and Elgin but thatits fragments could be widely spread.

He said the fragments could have easily punched holes in roofs and could have been as large as a basketball or as small as a BB.

They will have a fusion coating, ranging from brownish black togreenish black. The small fragments "will look like black olives," hesaid.

The meteor - it becomes a meteorite if it strikes the ground -entered the atmosphere weighing one or two tons, moving south anddropping at a 62-degree angle, based on reports of more than 70 who sawor heard it, Pugh said.

Some recorded images of its five-second appearance.

Images also were caught by two cameras in Canada's meteorite surveillance system and by others in Portland and Boise, Idaho.

Its greatest performance was over Helix, north of Pendleton, whereits light was blinding and its sonic booms deafening, he said.

"It blew people out of bed in Helix," Pugh said.

It generated three sonic booms, one reason why Pugh and otherscientists say they don't think it burned up completely while enteringthe Earth's atmosphere.

Pugh said that means it likely was a stony meteorite, by far themost common kind. Iron meteorites do not break up in the earth'satmosphere.

He said some people reported smelling sulfur. A Meacham residentreported a metallic taste in the mouth after the meteorite flew by.

He said two professional dealers have been scouring theElgin-Tollgate area, flying over it looking for the black dust thatwould have been created by the explosion, and for holes in the snow.

The searchers also have spent hours on snowmobiles.

More casual searchers, he said, can check not only roofs but to takea golf club, attach magnets to it, move it over rocks and save the onesthat stick to the club.

Anything that sticks could be a meteorite fragment.

If it is found it would be a first for Eastern Oregon. Four havebeen found in Western Oregon, he said, but none on the eastern sidebecause fewer people live there.

Such searches are difficult because many meteorites resemble the area's abundant basalt rock.

Pugh will attend a meteorite conference in a few months and expects everyone to ask the same question: "Where is it?"

He isn't looking for fires, he says, because meteorites don't start them.

The interiors are frigid since they just came from space, where thetemperature is 200 degrees below zero. Some meteorites found secondsafter landing have frost on them, Pugh said.

"You have a better chance of getting frostbite from a meteorite than of getting burned," he said.

Canadian astronomers at the University of Western Ontario arehunting for pieces of a meteorite they videotaped falling to Earth.

Associate Professor Peter Brown said the university's network ofall-sky cameras shot video of the large fireball at 10:59 p.m. lastWednesday.

Brown and post doctoral student Wayne Edwards are asking for thehelp of local residents in recovering meteorites that might havecrashed in the Parry Sound area.

Most meteoroids burn up by the time they hit an altitude of (36-42miles) from Earth, said Edwards. We tracked this one to an altitude ofabout (14 miles) so we are pretty sure there are at least one, andpossibly many meteorites, that made it to the ground.

Edwards said the area where meteorites would have fallen has been calculated at about 5 square miles.

We would love to find a recovered meteorite on this one, because wehave the video and we have the data and by putting that together withthe meteorite, there is a lot to be learned, he said.

A meteor slammed into the southern Peruvian town of Carangas on September 16, 2007, leaving a 50-foot-deep (15-meter-deep) crater, seen here two days after the impact.

New investigations of the crash site reveal that the meteor stayed as one piece during its journey through Earth's atmosphere, challenging previous views that such objects break apart and scatter before hitting the ground, experts say.

Scientists have thought that the objects break up into flattenedclusters of particles that spread out like a pancake as they plungeinto Earth's atmosphere, said Peter Schultz, a geology professor fromBrown University who studies meteorite impacts.

This would cause the pieces to burn up in the atmosphere or slowdown and drop to the ground like rocks dropped from an airplane.

The fragments would make holes in the ground like pits - but not craters, according to Schultz.

Yet "the [Peruvian] meteorite kept on going at a speed about 40 to50 times faster than it should have been going," defying the theory,Schultz said.

In fact it came down intact as a giant fireball at about 15,000miles (about 24,000 kilometers) an hour, creating a 50-foot-deep(15-meter-deep) crater.

This unusual occurrence had some scientists wondering if thePeruvian crater might have been caused by something different, or evenfaked, Schultz said. "At the time, rumors were flying."

So he traveled to Peru to look at the crater, which is located in the village of Carangas, near the Bolivian border.

The Real Thing

The most likely alternative was that the impact was simply thelargest of a widely strewn field of meteor fragments, and thescientists found only only one crater.

The fabricated-meteorite-crater theory was then ruled out whenSchultz's team found "shock" features and intricate mixing of themeteoritic dust in the surrounding rock, indicating that something hadindeed crashed into it.

The question is how the meteor-which Schultz estimates to have beenroughly the equivalent of a three- to six-foot-long (one- totwo-meter-long) boulder-managed to stick together and retain its speed,rather than dispersing into a shotgun blast of small fragments.

In research presented today at the Lunar and Planetary ScienceConference in League City, Texas, Schultz and colleagues suggested thatthe fragments might have been trapped and smoothed into an aerodynamicshape by the shock wave created by their movement through theatmosphere.

He compares it to the way sediments in a streambed can be shaped by flowing water.

"Rather than flying apart," he told National Geographic News, "[perhaps] it shaped into a needle and pierced the atmosphere."

Owen B. Toon, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Coloradoat Boulder who was not involved in the study, finds it "quiteinteresting."

"We know from impacts such as Tunguska [a Russian crater from a 1908impact] that fairly large objects [half a football field in diameter]can blow up in the atmosphere and leave no crater or obvious debrisfield on the ground," he said by email.

"The behavior is related to the strength of the material, since ironobjects of this size leave a large crater behind. Hopefully Peter[Schultz] will learn more about the crater and impactor in this articleso that we can understand better how it reached the surface."

Protection Needed

Regardless of what happened, Schultz wants to see the crater protected for future research.

It made news around the world: On Sept. 15, 2007, an objecthurtled through the sky and crashed into the Peruvian countryside.Scientists dispatched to the site near the village of Carancas found agaping hole in the ground.

Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown Universityand an expert in extraterrestrial impacts, went to Peru to learn more.Brown graduate student Robert "Scott" Harris collaborated on theresearch, joined by Jose Ishitsuka, a Peruvian astrophysicist, andGonzalo Tancredi, an astronomer from Uruguay.

What Schultz and his team found is surprising. The object thatslammed into a dry riverbed in Peru was a meteorite, and it left a49-foot-wide crater. Soil ejected from the point of impact was foundnearly four football fields away. When Schultz's team analyzed the soilwhere the fireball hit, he found "planar deformation features," orfractured lines in sand grains found in the ground. Along withevidence of debris strewn over a wide area, the shattered sand grainstold Schultz that the meteorite had maintained a high rate of speed asit shot through the atmosphere. Scientists think it was traveling atroughly 15,000 miles per hour at the moment of impact.

"Normally with a small object like this, the atmosphere slows itdown, and it becomes the equivalent of a bowling ball dropping into theground," Schultz said. "It would make a hole in the ground, like a pit,but not a crater. But this meteorite kept on going at a speed about 40to 50 times faster than it should have been going."

Scientists have determined the Carancas fireball was a stonymeteorite - a fragile type long thought to be ripped into pieces as itenters the Earth's atmosphere and then leaves little more than awhisper of its journey.

Yet the stony meteorite that struck Peru survived its passage mostly intact before impact. "Thisjust isn't what we expected," Schultz said. "It was to the point thatmany thought this was fake. It was completely inconsistent with ourunderstanding how stony meteorites act."

Schultz said that typically fragments from meteorites shoot off inall directions as the object speeds to Earth. But he believes thatfragments from the Carancas meteorite may have stayed within thefast-moving fireball until impact. How that happened, Schultz thinks,is due to the meteorite's high speed. At that velocity, the fragmentscould not escape past the "shock-wave" barrier accompanying themeteorite and instead "reconstituted themselves into another shape," hesaid.

That new shape may have made the meteorite more aerodynamic -imagine a football passing through air versus a cinderblock - meaningit encountered less friction as it sped toward Earth, hitting thesurface as one large chunk.

"It became very streamlined and so it penetrated the Earth's atmosphere more efficiently," Schultz said.

Schultz's theory could upend the conventional wisdom thatall small, stony meteorites disintegrate before striking Earth. Ifcorrect, it could change the thinking about the size and type ofextraterrestrial objects that have bombarded the Earth for eons andcould strike our planet next.

"You just wonder how many other lakes and ponds were created by astony meteorite, but we just don't know about them because when thesethings hit the surface they just completely pulverize and then theyweather," said Schultz, director of the Northeast Planetary Data Centerand the NASA/Rhode Island University Space Grant Consortium.

Schultz's research could have implications for Mars, where cratershave been discovered in recent missions. "They could have come fromanything," he said. "It would be interesting to study these smallcraters and see what produced them. Perhaps they also will defy ourunderstanding."

These findings will be present at the 39th annual Lunar andPlanetary Science Conference in League City, Texas on March 11, 2008.

Astronomers from the University of Western Ontario are searching for a meteorite that landed in central Ontario last week.

The "large fireball" was captured falling last Wednesday at 10:59p.m. ET by sky-monitoring cameras at the London, Ont.-based university.Astronomers narrowed the impact site down to about 12 square kilometrescentred on Parry Sound, which is around 220 kilometres north of Toronto.

The astronomy department at the University of Western Ontario captured this rare footage of a meteor streaking to Earth last week over Parry Sound, Ont.

Associate professor Peter Brown and post-doctoral student WayneEdwards put out a call to residents of the region for signs of themeteorite or meteorites. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere by thetime they get to within 60 or 70 kilometres of the Earth, but this onewas tracked until 24 kilometres.

"We are pretty sure there are at least one, and possibly manymeteorites, that made it to the ground," Edwards said on theuniversity's website.

The astronomers said the rocks would probably weigh a kilogram orslightly more, but acknowledged the chances of finding a large chunkwere not good given that the meteorite seems to have fallen into a lakein the area.

The university said it would like to find any of the meteorites for research purposes.

"We would love to find a recovered meteorite on this one, because wehave the video and we have the data, and by putting that together withthe meteorite, there is a lot to be learned," Edwards said.

The researchers have created a map to help people find the spacerocks. The map, along with the video footage of the meteorite falling,are posted on the university's website.

For decades geologists have debated whether Upheaval Dome in Utah's Canyonlands National Park, pictured here, was created by a volcanic outburst, an eruption of salt or a meteor impact. The crucial clue was the discovery there of "shocked quartz," which can be created only by the intense pressures of a violent meteor impact, say researchers.

For decades geologists have debated whether the picturesque "Sphinxof Geology," viewed by millions of park visitors, was created by avolcanic outburst, an eruption of salt or a meteor impact. Thena crucial clue was discovered: "shocked quartz," which can be createdonly by the intense pressures of a violent meteor impact.

"This is great news because finally, after so many years ofsearching, the final clue that Upheaval Dome is an impact structure hasbeen discovered," said impact crater researcher Christian Koeberl ofthe University of Vienna in Austria. "Their data are convincing."

The discovery was made by German researchers Elmar Buchner andThomas Kenkmann, who published their findings in the March issue of thejournal Geology. Surprisingly, the shocked grains of quartzwere located not at the center of the crater, but off to one side,suggesting that the meteor struck the Earth at an angle.

"Discovery of shock metamorphic features...is a requirement to'nail' the impact origin of a feature, and they have done it," Koeberltold Discovery News.

In the 1930s, Upheaval Dome was interpreted as a volcanic feature byone geologist. Thirty years later, in the 1960s, another geologistproposed that it was the result of ancient sea salts buried under therock. The salt, less dense than rock, rises up in the ground -- like adrop of oil rising up through water -- and buoys up the rock into adome.

The meteor impact idea wasn't officially taken up by any researchers until the 1980s, and remained inconclusive until now.

"The very controversial debate about Upheaval Dome's origin haslasted nearly a century, over the course of which extremely differenthypotheses (gradualism versus catastrophism) have been proposed,"report Buchner and Kenkmann.

The debate has, in fact, reflected a historical divide of ideas in geology over those decades.

On one hand there were the "gradualists" who adhered to the ideathat just about everything we see on the planet today is the result ofgradual processes still at work -- glaciers moving, rains falling,rivers flowing, etc. Gradualism was considered heretical when it wasproposed by James Hutton in the late 18th century because it impliesthe Earth was tremendously older than some Biblical scholars hadclaimed.

These Biblical scholars cited such catastrophes as Noah's flood toexplain such geological oddities as marine fossils atop mountains. Theseearly "catastrophists" tended to ignore evidence that went againsttheir Biblical interpretation of the geological record. In other words,they weren't very scientific.

As a result, geologists are trained to tread very carefully whereverextraordinary events are being called on to explain geologicalfeatures. The trouble is, of course, there are some things likeUpheaval Dome, which are, as we now know, genuine creations ofextraordinary -- albeit non-Biblical -- catastrophic events.

In September 2007 a fireball flew in from space and hurtled thoughEarth's atmosphere, smashing into the ground in Peru while awestruckwitnesses watched. It was the first time people have witnessed spacedebris forming an impact crater live.

But the witnesses' reports andthe geological aftermath stunned scientists. This meteorite seemed tohave flown in much faster than scientists thought possible for anobject of this kind, and it apparently survived entering Earth'satmosphere intact, rather than splintering into bits as experts thoughtit should have.

"Many people thought this was a fake," said Peter Schultz, a BrownUniversity planetary geologist who traveled to Peru to analyze thecrater. "It just didn't make sense with what we understand ofcollisions with this type of fragile rock. Coming through theatmosphere they get stressed so highly that they typically break apart.But this one didn't do that."

Let's go look

A few months after the impact, Schultz went to investigate thecrater along with Peruvian scientists and government officials. Hepresented his findings today at the 39th annual Lunar and PlanetaryScience Conference in League City, Texas.

Schultz found fractured lines in sand grains and compressed mixturesof earth and meteorite around the 49-foot-wide crater near the villageof Carancas. These, along with widespread debris from the meteorite'scrash landing, told him it landed at high speed, likely around 15,000miles per hour at the moment of impact.

The meteorite was a common type, a chunk of silicate rock called astony meteorite. Usually a projectile such as this would be slowed downby the drag of Earth's atmosphere. By the time it landed, it would betraveling at the normal terminal speed of any object falling from thesky, and would probably dint a hole in the ground, but not a crater.

"Essentially Carancas threw us this high-speed curveball," Schultztold SPACE.com. "The mystery is why it didn't slow down and how did itmake it all the way to the Earth intact to form a crater? These arequestions we have to resolve."

New thinking

Scientists have several hypotheses about what might have happened.Perhaps as the meteorite hurtled through the atmosphere it melted andmorphed, becoming more of an aerodynamic needle-shape that could resiststress and survive in one piece. Plus, this shape would help it hold onto its speed, since the surface area exposed to atmospheric drag forceswould be reduced.

"But the mystery is, why wouldn't all objects reshape?" Schultzsaid. "Maybe it requires special circumstances, like the angle ofentry."

The unique event could change scientists' thinking about howmeteorites act, and how other craters on Earth were formed, especiallyones similar to the Carancas site, where water has since collected inthe hole.

"What does this mean for other small water-filled ponds?" Schultzasked. "You just wonder how many of these have powdered remains of astony meteorite at the bottom, something that would be difficult tofind after time."

A meteorite dubbed GRA 06129 is one of two space objects that has scientists stymied. Experts initially thought the meteorites shared their origins with the moon or perhaps Venus, but those theories have now been discounted.

The rocks were oddly rusty and salty and smelled like rotten eggs, its discoverers said.

Initially, a team at the University of New Mexico (UNM) caused astir when its analysis hinted that the pair may hail from Venus or themoon.

But other teams then hurried to get pieces of the space rocks for analyses of their own - and for the most part, they disagree.

GRA 06128 looks like rocks retrieved from the lunar highlands by theApollo 16 astronauts in 1972, but it contains much more sodium,research has shown.

The rock is also much older than the Venusian surface, according to the newer analysis, thereby eliminating that possibility.

The identity of the meteorites' source remains exciting andmysterious, said Allan Treiman, a scientist with the Lunar andPlanetary Institute in Houston who led one of the recent investigationsof the rocks.

"From what has been reported so far, it's pretty clear that themeteorite is not from the Earth, or the moon, or Venus, or any of thecommon sources of meteorites," he said. "It's much harder to know whereit is from."

Both teams - along with three others - are presenting findings aboutthe meteorites at the 39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference inHouston this week.

The researchers analyzed chemical signatures called isotopes andinitially determined that the meteorites came from Earth or the moon, aposition they've since retooled.

"Although initial oxygen isotopic compositions are consistent withan origin in the Earth-Moon system, numerous observations appear toeliminate both bodies," Shearer and his team write in an abstractpresented at this week's meeting.

Doug Rumble from the Carnegie Institution and his colleagues willalso present an analysis of GRA 06128 and 06129 at the conference.

He said the New Mexico researchers initially studied a "tiny crumbthat fell off the outside" of GRA 06129, but they didn't wash the outerlayer to remove any Earthly weathering agents that might alter thefindings.

"The UNM analytical results reflect only imperfectly the actualextraterrestrial composition of the meteorite, because UNM alsoanalyzed rust that formed as the meteorite lay exposed to Earth'satmosphere," he said.

Rumble's own analysis puts the meteorites "right in the range ofvalues expected for rare meteorites called brachinites," he said.

"So now we are all meeting in Houston to hang our heads a little andadmit to one another that maybe we were a little too hasty," Rumblesaid, "and got too excited over an unwashed meteorite."

Unsettled Debate David Kring, a visiting scientist at Houston'sLunar and Planetary Institute and a co-author on Treiman's paper, saidthere's still work to be done to nail down the exact nature of themeteorite pair.

The chemical and mineral compositions of the rocks are similar tobrachinites and another type of meteorite called chondrites, he said.

Chondrites, leftovers from the formation of asteroids, are the mostcommon meteorites. But the pair doesn't match either category exactly,Kring said.

The rocks are partially melted, which is not characteristic of chondrites.

And they contain high levels of the mineral feldspar, which is nottypically associated with the short-lived planets between Mars andJupiter.

"Thus there are two mysteries," Kring said. "What is the parentplanet for the rock, and what type of geologic activity on that planetproduced the unusual mineral assemblage?"

There is no shortage of new ideas to account for the disparity.

"My preferred working hypothesis is that [the meteorites] actuallyrepresent a piece of crust from an asteroidal body - the surface ofanother planet, if you like," offered James Day, a geologist at theUniversity of Maryland.

Day has joined the other researchers at this week's meeting to puzzle over the rocks.

Treiman added that it would take a very large asteroid or a dwarf planet to cause the melting seen in the meteorites.

Whether or not its home is discovered, GRA 06128 is a "prettypuzzle, and will help us understand how asteroids form and how theyevolve to become planets," he said.

Goodness gracious, great balls of fire were seen falling from the sky Monday.

The sightings have puzzled astronomers and local experts who've failed to come up with an explanation.

Some witnesses described the unidentified flying objects as being bright blue, green, red or yellow.

While most sightings were reported around 1:30 p.m. near Sudbury,Hagar, Highway 69 North and North Bay, Wayne Lachance spotted somethingin the sky earlier in the morning.

Lachance was driving home to Massey after a night shift at Vale Inco Ltd. when something caught his eye around 7:30 a.m.

"I thought it was a real bright star," he said. "It was getting brighter and coming down with sparks."

Lachance arrived home and looked outside his bedroom window to see "spirals of smoke" falling.

Science North fielded about a dozen calls from residents who saw the fiery objects around 1:30 p.m.

Howie Mende, a staff scientist with a background in physics whoworks at the science centre, said the bright balls of fire couldpossibly be aircraft, a meteor, meteorite or satellite debris.

The amateur astronomer didn't see anything in the sky Monday, but spoke to many residents who did.

"Everybody who saw it thought it was near them," Mende said.

"It could be that it was different objects or it could be the sameobject and your perception of the space between you and the object getsdistorted because it's such a rare event."

One person thought the object burned up before it reached the Earth, while other witnesses said it hit the ground.

"One person even thought a piece hit near her home, literally a few houses away," said Mende.

If the object was a falling meteorite, Mende said it's not unusual for it to happen during daylight.

"In our solar system, we're basically just another sphere," he said."There's a whole bunch of other activity happening out there."

After speaking to witnesses, Mende believes the objects were anywhere from the size of a marble to a basketball.

"Can we even detect something that small with any accuracy?" If it'sany bigger than that, there's a better chance of it hitting the Earthand us hearing or feeling an impact."

Last week, researchers at the University of Western Ontario reportedthat a blazing meteor captured on video may have fallen to Earth alongthe shore of Georgian Bay.

On March 5 at 10:59 p.m., the university's Physics and AstronomyDepartment's network of all-sky cameras - stationed across southernOntario - picked up images of a large fireball streaking across thesky.

A large fireball that flashed through the sky over central B.C.early today was caused by a Russian rocket that fell from space, thethird time pieces of Russian space junk have fallen in the province,police said.

Const. Gary Godwin of the Prince George RCMP said dozens ofwitnesses called about 1 a.m. saying they had seen a huge orange-red"meteor" in an area over Prince George.

"We had numerous reports of bright flashes across the sky going from east to west," said Godwin.

The RCMP dispatched vehicles to the scene in case of a plane crashor the chance of recovering a meteorite, but nothing was found.

Godwin said the file had been turned over to the RCMP's E Division in Vancouver for further investigation.

"It might have been pieces from a Russian rocket that haddisconnected and fell back into Earth's atmosphere," he said. Godwinsaid it was the third time Russian space junk had been spotted fallingover B.C., but he could not say when the other two incidents hadoccurred.

The North American Aerospace Defence Command, or NORAD, said today aRussian SL6 rocket fell from space and crossed over an area fromKamloops to Dawson Creek, a distance of about 800 kilometres.

The Department of National Defence said the incident was being dealtwith by Canada's Public Safety Department, which was preparing aresponse.

Prince George, British Columbia - The search is on for a fiery object spotted over Prince George.

Callers tell Opinion 250 that just before 1:00 this morning, a largeobject with a fiery tail crossed over the city in a northwestdirection. One caller says truckers were on their radios saying theythought it was a plane of some sort.

"It was more orange than red, streaking across the sky, I only sawit for a few seconds, and it was heading towards Huble homestead."

Our caller says if it was a meteor, or space junk "It's a pretty big one, 'cause this was a large object"

At the time of this posting, there had been no reports of missingplanes. A spokesman from the Air and Marine Emergency Centre,Department of National Defence, says there are no missing planes,although they have received numerous reports from the north of fierysightings . A spokesman says he can only speculate that it was a largemeteor in the sky over Prince George.

There have been reports of the fireball called in from Kamloops through to Dawson Creek.

The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten generoushelpings from outer space, according to a new study. Scientists at theCarnegie Institution have discovered concentrations of amino acids intwo meteorites that are more than ten times higher than levelspreviously measured in other similar meteorites. This result suggeststhat the early solar system was far richer in the organic buildingblocks of life than scientists had thought, and that fallout from spacemay have spiked Earth's primordial broth.

The study, by Marilyn Fogel of Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory andConel Alexander of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism with ZitaMartins of Imperial College London and two colleagues, will bepublished in Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

Amino acids are organic molecules that form the backbone ofproteins, which in turn build many of the structures and drive many ofthe chemical reactions inside living cells. The production of proteinsis believed to constitute one of the first steps in the emergence oflife. Scientists have determined that amino acids could also haveformed in some environments on the early Earth, but the presence ofthese compounds in certain meteorites has led many researchers to lookto space as a source.

The meteorites used for the study were collected in Antarctica in1992 and 1995 and held in the meteorite collection at the NASA JohnsonSpace Center in Houston, Texas. Antarctica is the world's richesthunting ground for meteorites, which are naturally concentrated inso-called blue ice regions and held in cold storage by the ice.

For the amino acid study, the researchers took small samples fromthree meteorites of a rare type called CR chondrites, thought tocontain the oldest and the most primitive organic materials found inmeteorites. CR chondrites date from the time of the solar system'sformation. During an early phase of their history the meteorites werepart of a larger "parent body," such as an asteroid, which later wasshattered by impacts.

The analysis revealed that while one sample showed a relatively lowabundance of amino acids, the other two meteorites had the highest everseen in primitive meteorites - 180 and 249 ppm (parts per million).Other primitive meteorites that have been studied generally have aminoacid concentrations of 15 ppm or less. Because organic molecules fromextra-terrestrial sources have ratios of carbon isotopes different fromthose of Earthly biological sources, the researchers were able to ruleout contamination as a factor in their result.

"The amino acids probably formed within the parent body before itbroke up," says Alexander. "For instance. ammonia and other chemicalprecursors from the solar nebula, or even the interstellar medium,could have combined in the presence of water to make the amino acids.Then, after the break up, some of the fragments could have showereddown onto the Earth and the other terrestrial planets. These sameprecursors are likely to have been present in other primitive bodies,such as comets, that were also raining material onto the early Earth."

Two rocks found together in Antarctica are chunks of a dwarf planetthat was smashed apart early in the solar system's history, detailedstudies suggest. Other remnants of the proto-world may still befloating around in the asteroid belt, and might be identifiable by thespectrum of the sunlight they reflect.

In the solar system's first few tens of millions of years,collisions between rocky objects and the decay of radioactive isotopesmelted the interiors of large objects. Magma oceans - perhaps hundredsof kilometres deep - lapped over the Moon, the Earth, and other largebodies, allowing dense material to settle towards their centres in aprocess called differentiation.

The two meteorite pieces, called GRA 06128 and GRA 06129 after theGraves Nunataks area of Antarctica where they were found together in2006, show evidence of such differentiation - which suggests they camefrom a massive body.

That's because the two objects are made mostly of a mineral called feldspar, which constitutes about 75 to 90% of their volume.

Feldspar is even more abundant in some lunar rocks. That is thoughtto be the result of crystals of feldspar solidifying from the earlymagma ocean on the Moon. Because feldspar is a relatively lightweightmineral, it would have floated to the top of the magma ocean, allowingit to form a highly concentrated layer of the mineral.

The amount of feldspar in the two meteorite fragments suggests theyare remnants of a very large body that differentiated in a similar way,according to Allan Treiman of the Lunar and Planetary Institute inHouston, Texas, US, who led a study of one of the fragments.

'Strange new world'

Other studies of the meteorite, including one led by Richard Ash ofthe University of Maryland in College Park, another headed by ChipShearer of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and a thirdhelmed by Ryan Zeigler of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri,all in the US, agree that the parent body must have been massive enoughto have separated into layers.

The feldspar concentrations suggest that body was probably smallerthan the 3500-kilometre-wide Moon but larger than Vesta, the thirdlargest asteroid in the solar system at 578 kilometres across, saysTreiman.

That's because meteorites believed to be from Vesta containsolidified lava, but not large concentrations of feldspar. Thatsuggests that Vesta was massive enough to melt, but not so massive thatit differentiated to form a distinct layer of the mineral.

"This is a piece of a dwarf-planet size body that apparently nolonger exists," Treiman told New Scientist. "We have here a sample of astrange new world, a sample we've never seen before."

Ancient era

Zeigler, however, says the newly studied meteorites sharesimilarities with a class of meteorites called brachinites, whoseparent body appears to have been large enough to partially melt. "Ithink we can make a case that [the new discovery] is from thebrachinite parent body [but] I don't think we can say it definitivelyyet," he says.

The meteorites' composition has led scientists to rule out thepossibility that they are chips off of the Moon, Mars or Venus. And theratio of iron to manganese does not match that of Earth, ruling out thepossibility that it is an old chunk blasted off our planet's surfacethat later returned.

By measuring the radioactive decay of elements in the meteorite,scientists led by Richard Ash have shown that the rock must have formedaround 4.5 billion years ago, when Earth and the other planets werecoalescing.

Studying these fragments of a now-vanished object from that eraprovides a rare window into the early solar system, Treiman says. Atthat time, a lot of dwarf-planet size objects were flying around thesolar system. Some would have been flung out of the solar systemthrough gravitational interactions with other objects, while otherscollided to help build the planets present in the solar system today.

Remnant fragments

"We're looking maybe at a part of solar system history when dwarfplanets were all over the place and forming the terrestrial planets,"Treiman says.

But exactly what happened to the parent object of GRA 06128 and GRA06129 is not known. If it was destroyed in a collision, there may befragments of it still out there floating around the solar system asasteroids. Treiman says such fragments might be identified by theirlight spectra.

Some aspects of the meteorite, such as the high abundance of sodiumin some of its minerals, hint that the parent body may have contained alot of water, according to another study of the meteorite by TomokoArai of the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo, Japan.

The research from the five teams was presented on Wednesday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, US.

Meteorite impacts are often associated with huge disasters, massextinction and why the dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the Earthsome 65 million years ago. However, the opposite may also occur - thatnew and more varied animal life arises following such a catastrophe, isshown by new research conducted by the Natural History Museum ofDenmark, University of Copenhagen.

The Alpha-Monocerotid meteor outburst in 1995. Meteors are actually pieces of rock that have broken off a comet and continue to orbit the Sun.

Together with colleagues from Lund University in Sweden, twopalaeontologists, Svend Stouge and Dave Harper, have discovered thatthe Earth in the so-called Ordovician period 490-440 million years agowas struck by more than 100 meteorites at one time, and that in thewake of this event, new and more varied life evolved in the oceans,which at that time were home to virtually all life on Earth.

"You could say that biological evolution experienced a serious boostwithin a relatively short period of time. And, as is the case with, forexample, volcanic eruptions or large forest fires, the impactsinitially had a devastating effect on all life, but from the ashesarose a much richer fauna than had existed previously. And anotherinteresting aspect is that this situation occurred 40 million yearsafter the so-called Cambrian explosion. It was during this explosionthat the first complex multicellular creatures appeared, even thoughscientists are still discussing whether this evolution was a rapidexplosion or whether it took place over a longer period of time," saysDave Harper from the University of Copenhagen.

The conclusions of the two scientists are, among other things, basedon computer analyses, chemical samples from meteorites, fossils andexamination of different craters in Sweden, for example the largeLockne crater near Østersund in northern Sweden, which has a diameterof 7.5 km.

"So far, our research has shown that it was a regional phenomenonaround Baltica, the Baltic Sea of that time. The area underwent anextraordinary change during a short period of time in terms of theevolution of new species, primarily shellfish, e.g. the so-calledbrachiopods, which resemble today's mussels, but which already at thattime were quite different. We will now be studying whether this was aglobal phenomenon. It will be really exciting for the entire history ofevolution, especially as it does seem that there is some truth in itand in the impact theory. We have now found meteorites in southernChina with the same chemical composition as those we have studied inSweden. Consequently, we are going to be studying craters andmeteorites in China and in the USA to establish whether it was a globalphenomenon," says Svend Stouge from the Natural History Museum ofDenmark.

The findings of the two scientists have been published in the British journal Nature Geoscience.

Hopes of tracking down the elusive bountythat fell from Ontario's sky recently are fading faster than a meteortrail in full sunlight.

Two meteorites appear to have fallen to Earth in a week. The first -thought to have weighed 50 to 100 kilograms before it hit theatmosphere, and possibly hailing from beyond Jupiter - is believed tohave landed in the waters of Georgian Bay 10 days ago, about 9kilometres from the shore of Pointe au Baril.

Just as the excitement of that fall was dying down, the Universityof Western Ontario began receiving calls from people in severalNorthern Ontario towns who saw a fiery flash in the early-afternoon skylast Monday.

"People saw a ball of fire in the sky, heard large explosions," saidWayne Edwards, a postdoctoral astronomy student. But he said more workmust be done to be certain the sightings were of a meteor. "Verylong-distance meteors produce a low frequency sound. From this one, wehave a very weak reading that might be pointing to Northern Ontario.It's very hedgy at this point."

For meteorite collectors like Mike Tettenborn, the falls are tantalizing near-misses.

"Meteorites are very elusive, and very hard to find. They're rarerthan diamonds," Mr. Tettenborn said from his Owen Sound home. "It'sdisappointing [the Georgian Bay fall] is so far off shore. If it'dlanded inland, I'd have gone right away and started knocking on doors,asking if farmers had seen anything. At a moment's notice I'd go, but Ihaven't heard anything."

The UWO physics and astronomy department's network of all-skycameras - which give blanket coverage of Southern Ontario - picked upthe meteor over Georgian Bay as it streaked over Parry Sound at 10:59p.m. EST on March 5.

As news of the fall was made public, UWO's phones were abuzz withvolunteer meteorite hunters offering to help find whatever blazed itsway to Earth.

But they were warned that finding anything - the meteorite or itsdebris - is going to be difficult: Mr. Edwards said the water waslikely not frozen at the impact site, and last weekend'ssnowfallprobably covered any trace of the fragments that may have hitland.

Still, the team asked locals in the area to be on the lookout forany unusual objects. But in Pointe au Baril, the possibility of findingan ancient astronomical rarity barely raised a pulse.

"My daughter read about it, but other than that we didn't even knowit had happened," said resident Richard Kaster. "It's not exactly bignews here."

Meteorite seekers, though, are keeping a careful eye ondevelopments. Should someone notice unusual debris or rocks on theirPointe au Baril property, the rare-stone hunters will be out in fullforce, Mr. Tettenborn said.

There are more than 1,000 meteorite collectors worldwide whocommunicate online, trading tales and stones in a lucrative globalmarket that sees the space debris commanding higher prices than goldand diamonds. A few hundred people are "very active" like himself, Mr.Tettenborn said, and about a dozen big-time meteorite hunters flyaround the globe tracking down the ancient rocks for a living.

"For meteorite seekers it's very exciting [to hear of a fall].During snow time it's fantastic. If you see dark little stones on theground, great! The problem is, I don't think there's been ice that farout," he said.

"I'd fly anywhere in the States or Canada if there was a goodchance. I'd definitely go a day's drive. But the chances here areremote."

The Georgian Bay event is a bittersweet example of meteorite huntingin Southern Ontario: While there are plenty of people in the region tospot meteorites, there's also plenty of water for it to land in. And sofar, the water has been winning, Mr. Edwards said.

"On the whole, the Earth is gathering material all the time. Whetherthat's in our area is random chance," Mr. Edwards said. "There's largebodies of water around us, so there's a 50 per cent chance it will landin water. So far, we've had more hit water than hit land."

Another fiery object was seen falling in the sky near Sudbury during the weekend.

Susan Stone and her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, spotted what they think was a fireball at about 1:30 a.m. on Sunday.

"My first thought was it was a meteorite or a plane going down. The colours were just amazing," Susan said.

"I'm quite sure, actually, that it was a fireball because there was a trail and it was very vivid."

Last week, Science North fielded about a dozen calls from residentswho saw fiery objects in the sky at about 1:30 p.m. on March 10.

Susan and Taylor were driving to Sudbury after a hockey tournamentin Sault Ste. Marie early Sunday when they saw a flaming ball.

Susan, who lives in Ottawa, and Taylor, who lives in Sudbury, had just passed Webbwood when they saw the ball of light.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Susan, adding it was off tothe left of the road, which would put it northeast of Webbwood.

"There was kind of like a tail hanging behind it. It was alldifferent colours. It was really bright and vibrant," said Taylor, astudent at R.L. Beattie.

Taylor saw colours such as navy blue, violet, lime green, red,yellow, orange and aqua blue. The tail was more colourful than the bodyitself, she said.

"It lasted for about five or 10 seconds. It wasn't just going straight across, it was going downwards," Taylor said.

They called Science North on Sunday to ask where they should reportthe sighting. They were told to fill out an online form for theCanadian Fireball Network, which they did.

The sightings on March 10 were reported near Sudbury, Massey, Hagar, Highway 69 North and North Bay.

Witnesses described objects as bright blue, green, red or yellow.

Ontario Provincial Police also received several reports of fieryobjects falling from the sky on the afternoon of March 10. Reports camein from Kapuskasing to Parry Sound. Some even reported seeing theobjects hit the ground.

According to the American Meteor Society, a fireball is another termfor a bright meteor. They are brighter than magnitude -3, which isabout the same magnitude of Venus in the morning or evening sky.

The society says several thousand meteors of fireball magnitude occur in the Earth's atmosphere each day.

The vast majority, however, occur over oceans and uninhabited regions and many are masked by daylight.

You probably didn't realise it, but June is quite a dangerous month.Statistically, more meteorites fall in June than at any other time ofthe year - and 30 June is a particularly hazardous day. Since recordsbegan, 116 meteorites have plunged to Earth in June - their high season- compared with only 57 in March - their low season. At least 17 peopleare said to have been killed by meteorite impact.

Meteorites are pieces of rock - usually stone, sometimes metal and,occasionally, a mixture of both - which find their way to Earth fromthe asteroid belt, Mars, the Moon and, possibly, a few comets. Theytypically weigh a couple of kilograms (though this can varytremendously) and strike the Earth with velocities usually in the rangeof 100 to 250 metres per second. The Middlesbrough meteorite, forexample, which landed on 14 March 1881, had a terminal velocity of 126metres per second and weighed about 1.6 kilograms. Fortunately, it didlittle damage but had anyone been unfortunate enough to get in its waythey would not have lived to tell the tale.

The first recorded fatalities occurred in 616 BC when stonymeteorites were said to have crashed into chariots killing 10 men. Twomonks have been struck by meteorites: one in Cremona in 1511 and theother in Milan in 1650. In 1674 meteorites killed two Swedish sailorsaboard ship. There are also reports of a wedding guest being killed inone of the Balkan states, and a child in Japan. Few such reports arewell documented, and they may well be little more than stories.

Undoubtedly, people have had narrow escapes. On 14 July 1847 a17-kilogram meteorite fell into a bedroom in which three children wereasleep in Braunau, in what is now Austria. Although they were coveredin debris, none was seriously hurt. Not so lucky was Mrs Hewlett Hodgesof Sylacauga, Alabama, who was hit by a malevolent meteorite on 30November 1954 causing severe hip and abdominal injuries.

There are also accounts of animal deaths. A colt in New Concord,Ohio, perished when about 30 meteorites fell on 1 May 1860, severalcows were killed when a shower of stones hit Macau in Brazil on 11November 1836, and on 28 June 1911, 40 stones fell at Nakhla in Egyptkilling a dog. The Nakhla meteorite is only one of a handful ofspecimens that originated on Mars. To this day the Nakhla dog remainsthe only authenticated case of an Earthling being killed by a Martian.

Fatalities aside, meteorites - even small ones - can causeconsiderable damage to anything they hit. Returning to Milan, there isthe case of a red-hot meteorite landing in the castle on 23 June 1525,setting fire to the munitions. Perhaps not surprisingly, nothingremains of the meteorite.

About half of all meteorites break up in the atmosphere thusincreasing the chances of someone, or something, being hit. But anyonewho thinks that meteorite falls are more or less evenly distributedover the Earth's surface will find that the inhabitants of the smalltown of Wethersfield, Connecticut, probably disagree with them.

In 1987 Roy Clarke, a well-known meteoriticist, presented a paper tothe 50th meeting of the Meteoritical Society on his team'sinvestigations of the fall of some 39 meteorites in the US between 1932and 1982. The team was prompted to look at the damaging meteoritesafter two falls in the small town of Wethersfield. On 8 April 1971, a350-gram meteorite passed through the roof of a house and landed in theliving room. Eleven years later, on 8 November 1982, a second meteoriteof 2.7 kilograms struck another house only 2.7 kilometres from thefirst. On both occasions the fire service was called and, if localreports are true, each time the same fireman found the meteorite.

In case you are thinking that these two meteorites might have beenrelated in some way, they apparently had quite different histories. Themeteoriticists could tell that from the extent to which the meteoriteswere shocked. Isotope analyses showed that while the first fall hadseparated from its parent body about 3 million years ago, the secondobject became detached about 50 million years ago.

Since Clarke's report, one of the most celebrated meteorites is thePeekskill meteorite, named after the suburb of New York in which itfell last October. The 10-kilogram stone plunged straight through theboot of a Chevy Malibu, turning the driveway underneath into a crater.Fortunately, the owner of the car, 18-year-old high school studentMichelle Knapp, was not in the vehicle at the time. Unperturbed by hernear miss, and in the true spirit of American free enterprise, she soldthe $100 second-hand car, and the meteorite, to consortium led byMarlin Cilz of the Montana Meteorite Laboratory. Cilz will not say howmuch he paid for the meteorite, just that the price was very high. Asfor Knapp, she now has a decent runaround.

Quite clearly, as towns and cities expand, and as the world'spopulation increases, the chances of a meteorite striking a person orsome kind of artefact are going to increase.

All these cases involve quite small meteorites. Occasionally,however, an asteroid-sized body does strike our planet. The most famousincident in living memory happened in Siberia on 30 June 1908, when abrilliant fireball, said to be as bright as the Sun, swept across theskies of Russia and exploded 8 kilometres above Tunguska. The shockwave flattened 2200 square kilometres of dense forest and travelledaround the world several times. The portable huts of the Tungus nomadswere blown over, about 1000 reindeer were killed in the resultingstampede, and at the Vanovara factory, 60 kilometres from theexplosion, doors were lifted from their hinges, windows shattered andpictures fell from walls. Experts still disagree whether the object wasa comet or an asteroid (see New Scientist, Science, 16 January) but onething is for certain, if such an object ever explodes over a denselypopulated city such as London, Edinburgh or Birmingham it will be adisaster of immense proportions.

Tunguska-size impacts are, fortunately, rare but are probably morecommon than experts would have believed just a few years ago. We nowhave a better understanding of the sort of objects, and how many thereare, that linger in space near the Earth's orbit. So, although theobject that struck Tunguska was large and destructive, there arenumerous other bodies out there that are bigger and, potentially, morecatastrophic.

I can well remember sitting in a geology lecture ten years ago,shortly after Walter and Luis Alvarez had announced that the dinosaurshad been wiped out by a massive asteroidal impact. As with all 'new'theories, very few of those present had read the Alvarez's paper or, ifthey had, they failed to understand that massive impacts could bringabout a so-called 'nuclear winter'. The jokes started to fly and onestudent asked the lecturer how some creatures managed to survive.

'Perhaps they dodged out of the way,' he suggested. 'Or maybe they wore hard hats.'

So don't be a dinosaur, wear a hard hat this June.

Philip Bagnall is president of the Society of Meteoritophilesand a hard hat-carrying member of the International Tunguska Expedition.

Fort Worth, Texas -- Two Texas collegestudents discovered an asteroid while examining images of space on acomputer, a report said.

Tarrant County College students Ryan Gallagher and Robbyn Kindle,40, were recommended by their former physics professor, Raymond Benge,to be part of an international program to examine images of space forasteroids, the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram reported.

"It was confirmed last week. It is official. For undergraduate students to find an asteroid is very rare. There are a lot of astronomers who've never found one," Benge said of the students' March 9 discovery.

The International Astronomical Union assigned the asteroid a tentative identification of 2008 EB61, Benge said.

Gallagher and Kindle both have finished undergraduate studies butdecided to enroll in a science class to increase their odds of beingaccepted into graduate medical programs, the Star-Telegram reported.

Comment: It appears that it is not so rare for students to dscover asteroids:

Next time you're virtually roaming Google Earth, make sure you take a close look at any unusual landforms.

Geologist Arthur Hickman did just that, and is now the proud parentof the Hickman Crater, a meteorite crater in the Hamersley Ranges.

Dr Hickman, from the Geological Survey of Western Australia, wasusing Google Earth to look for iron ore when he noticed an unusuallycircular structure.

He sent a Google Earth picture of the structure to his colleague DrAndrew Glickson at the Australian National University, who latervisited the area and confirmed that Dr Hickman had found a particularlywell preserved meteorite crater.

"Our best estimate at the moment is that the crater is 10,000 to 100,000 years old," said Dr Hickman.

The crater is 270m across (around the size of the MCG) and is just 35km north of Newman, but hadn't been previously discovered.

The area was even mapped by the Geological Survey of WA about 20 years ago, but the crater went unnoticed.

So could anyone be using Google Earth and find their own meteorite crater?

"Sure," says Dr Hickman, "Large meteorites hit every few thousandyears, so when you consider that the landscape is millions of yearsold, there's a lot of potential for meteorite craters out there."

On a satellite image, meteorite craters are distinguishable fromother landforms because they are almost perfectly circular and have araised rim.

Dr Hickman said that about 30 per cent of Western Australia is shown in very high image quality on Google Earth.

The research done by Dr Glickson and his team suggest that theamount of energy released when the meteorite hit was the equivalent of200,000 to 300,000 tonnes of TNT.

The next stage of the geologists' research is to try and findfragments of the meteorite, a process that is being hindered by theamount of black iron-rich rock in the vicinity of the crater.

Ex-astronaut Rusty Schweickart wants to savethe world from an incoming asteroid -- the multimegaton variety blamedfor killing the dinosaurs -- and he thinks that the only sure-fire wayto keep them away is by using, of all things, diplomacy.

Mr. Schweickart was on the Apollo 9 mission that circled the earthtesting the lunar lander, and had a successful post-NASA career inbusiness. Now 72, he is spending his retirement trying to alert theworld to the problem of Near Earth Objects, or NEOs.

Most of the time, he conducts the campaign sitting at a laptopcomputer in the study of his home in the Sonoma County wine country ofNorthern California. The Web connects him to a global network of otherex-astronauts, astronomers, government scientists, space buffs andmore. Many of them are members of the B612 Foundation, which Mr.Schweickart helped to found to research the problem.

Asteroids have been studied for centuries. But there are still somany gaps in our understanding of them that Mr. Schweickart says he hashad to pioneer a lot of asteroidology himself. He tells me, "You arelooking at the world's expert in deflecting asteroids, and that is justinexcusable."

The basics of the problem are familiar to Discovery Channelviewers. Now and then, one of the millions of chunks in the AsteroidBelt gets knocked into a different orbit, one that might one day leadto a collision with Earth.

The best place online to follow all this is at neo.jpl.nasa.gov,where Mr. Schweickart himself checks in several times a day. It's akind of Facebook for asteroids, each one having its own home page,along with a cool Java applet showing its orbits.

When it comes to actually dealing with an asteroid, theHollywood option, of nuking it to smithereens, is the least useful,says Mr. Schweickart, largely because you can't control the debris.

Serious students of the topic prefer the idea of crashing aspacecraft into the asteroid, thus nudging it into a new orbit. Infact, merely orbiting a spacecraft nearby might do the same trick, onaccount of the craft's gravitational pull.

Because asteroids have these sorts of easily imagined happy endings,it's a more pleasant apocalypse to contemplate than, say, globalwarming, for which there is no such easy solution.

Deadly asteroids also have something else going for them: They canbe dealt with for a relatively small amount of money. Spending $100million or $200 million a year for a decade will put in place all thetelescopes necessary to have a complete census of all of the NEOs thatthreaten Earth. (Current efforts, of which there are several, tell usabout only a fraction of them.) Such a tracking program would likelygive us a warning time of decades ahead of any possible collision.

The hard part of asteroids, says Mr. Schweickart, and the part he isspending nearly all of his time on right now, involves finding a way toreach a global agreement on how the planet would respond should anasteroid head our way.

This is where the astronaut starts to think like a diplomat. Indeed,several of the messages in his inbox last week involved a meeting he'shoping to have in the fall with the secretary-general of the UnitedNations.

Mr. Schweickart knows what you're probably thinking at this point:That eliminating an asteroid is a job for Bruce Willis, not for a bunchof diplomats. Hence, a short lesson from Mr. Schweickart, him with anMIT degree, in orbital mechanics.

When an object like an asteroid is known to be heading toward Earth,its exact splashdown point can't be calculated with any certainty.Instead, scientists know only that it will fall someplace on a thinline along the Earth's surface. These are the sorts of trajectoriesthat make news when wayward satellites drop back to terra firma.

Now suppose the impact line for an asteroid begins over Country A,extends through Country B and ends at Country C. To nudge the asteroidso that it misses Earth completely, you first have to push it in onedirection or another -- in effect, toward either A or C. That meansthat residents of either A or C will bear a slightly greater risk ifthe rescue effort doesn't push the asteroid quite hard enough.

Naturally, the citizens of A and C, and their political leaders,will be screaming for the asteroid to be pushed in the other country'sdirection and out of their backyard.

Mr. Schweickart says the only fair way to proceed is to have adecision-making formula drawn up well in advance, thus unaffected bythe political heat of an actual crisis.

Another reason to involve the U.N., says Mr. Schweickart, is toovercome global suspicion that a unilateral American antiasteroideffort would be a ruse to militarize space. Mr. Schweickart says healso is concerned about the issue. Many in Washington, he says, seemalmost exclusively interested in the nuclear option.

Mr. Schweickart has been working on NEOs since 2001, and says hewill spend another year on the project before turning the reins over tosomeone else. In the meantime, he's talking to everyone he can.

"Let's face it," he says, "being an ex-astronaut opens a lot of doors for you."

Comment:

Because asteroids have these sorts of easily imagined happy endings,it's a more pleasant apocalypse to contemplate than, say, globalwarming, for which there is no such easy solution.

Deadly asteroids also have something else going for them: They canbe dealt with for a relatively small amount of money. [...]Such atracking program would likely give us a warning time of decades aheadof any possible collision.

While the above paragraphs attempt to make the issue of asteroidcollision sound like an easy to deal with situation, consider thisscenario, from The Cosmic Winter, by Victor Clube and Bill Napier, as is presented in the SOTT editorial The Hope.

Go outside, look up at night, wait long enough, and zip! You'll see a tiny bit of rock burn up in our atmosphere: a meteor.

But other objects get hit too, including the Moon. It happens morerarely; the Moon presents a smaller cross-section to get hit, and itsgravity is lower so it cannot draw in material as well as Earth. Buthit it does get, and if you watch long enough you'll see one.

Amateur astronomer George Varros did just that on March 13, andbetter yet, he had a video camera hooked up to his telescope! Hecaptured an impact, and has an animation on his site of it; the image above is a still from it.

These are notoriously hard to get on video, and even then they areharder to confirm; it might be something else like a flaw in thecamera. But in this case, other cameras caught it,so this has been confirmed; it was the equivalent of about 100kilograms of TNT exploding on the lunar surface. Assuming an impactspeed of 30 km/sec (that's a complete guess, but about the speed of anorbiting object near the Earth's distance from the Sun) the objectitself would have massed about a ton kilogram. If it were a rockysphere it would have been about a meter across 10 centimeters across,roughly the size of a baseball. Not something you want hitting yourhouse!

Varros has a page listing other impactshe's caught as well. Very cool, and very useful! Eventually, when we goback to the Moon, the number and size of impacts on the surface willdetermine how we build structures on - or below - the lunar surface.

Comment: The image below represents the impactsthat were caught on film. How many more were not seen? How many morehave impacted on the dark side of the moon?

Using visible and infrared data collected from telescopes onHawaii's Mauna Kea, a team of scientists, led by the University ofMaryland's Jessica Sunshine, have identified three asteroids thatappear to be among our Solar System's oldest objects.

Evidence indicates that these ancient asteroids are relativelyunchanged since they formed some 4.55 billion years ago and are olderthan the oldest meteorites ever found on Earth, say Maryland's Sunshineand colleagues from the City University of New York, the SmithsonianInstitution, and the University of Hawaii. Their findings will bepublished in this week's edition of Science Express.

"We have identified asteroids that are not represented in ourmeteorite collection and which date from the earliest periods of theSolar System," said Sunshine, a senior research scientist in theUniversity of Maryland's department of astronomy. "These asteroids areprime candidates for future space missions that could collect andreturn samples to Earth providing a more detailed understanding of theSolar System's first few millions of years."

In the Beginning

At the beginning of the Solar System, there was just a disk-shapedcloud of hot gas, the solar nebula. When gasses on the edge of theearly nebula began to cool, the first materials to condense into solidparticles were rich in the elements calcium and aluminum. As the gassescooled further, other materials also began to condense. Eventually thedifferent types of solid particles clumped together to form the commonbuilding blocks of comets, asteroids, and planets. Astronomers havethought that at least some of the Solar System's oldest asteroidsshould be more enriched in calcium and aluminum, but, until the currentstudy, none had been identified.

Meteorites found on Earth do contain small amounts of these earliestcondensing materials. As seen in meteorites, these bright white ancientmaterials, the so-called calcium, aluminum-rich inclusions, or CAIs,can be as large as a centimeter in diameter. Scientists, in fact, longhave used the age of CAIs to define the age of the Solar System.

"The fall of the Allende meteorite in 1969 initiated a revolution inthe study of the early Solar System," said Tim McCoy, curator of thenational meteorite collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum ofNatural History. "It was at that time scientists first recognized thatthe remarkable white inclusions -- later called calcium, aluminum-richinclusions-- which were found in this meteorite, matched many of theproperties expected of early Solar System condensates.

"I find it amazing that it took us nearly 40 years to collectspectra of these [CAI-rich] objects and that those spectra would nowinitiate another revolution, pointing us to the asteroids that recordthis earliest stage in the history of our Solar System," said McCoy.

Sunshine and McCoy, with colleagues Harold Connolly, Jr, CityUniversity of New York; Bobby Bus, Institute for Astronomy, Universityof Hawaii, Hilo; and Lauren La Croix, Smithsonian Institution, used theSpeX instrument at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii tolook at the surface of asteroids for evidence of the presence of suchearly bits of high-temperature rock. In particular, they looked forspectral "fingerprints" indicative of the presence of CAIs. Becausedifferent minerals have different reflective properties, the spectrum,or color of light reflected from a surface, reveals information aboutits composition enabling telescopic compositional analysis.

In their paper, Sunshine and colleagues quantitatively compare thespectral signatures of asteroid surfaces and CAIs in meteorites fromthe Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History collection."Several CAI-rich asteroids have been identified that contain 2-3 timesmore CAI material than any known meteorite," Sunshine said. "Thus itappears ancient asteroids have indeed survived, and we know where theyare."

You'd have a tough time convincing residents of Twin Falls County'sWest End that the recent late-night mystery noises aren't coming fromthe Air Force ... The eastern edge of the Idaho Training Range is only40 miles from Castleford and Buhl, and a supersonic jet travels 40miles in 3 minutes ...

So West Enders are accustomed to things that go bump - and go bump loudly - in the night ...

"Usually we hear the explosions when the air is humid and cold, thustransmitting sound easier," said Filer farmer Bill Bitzenburg ... "Manytimes in the summer you see flashes then hear nothing, because of thewarm thin air" ...

In March 1997, a sonic boom was blamed for damaging theCastleford High School gym - $150,000 worth of damage ... The Air Forcedenied it was responsible and refused to pay compensation ...

But the incident transformed many Castleforders into amateur sonicboom experts, packing stopwatches so they could keep track of sonicbombs and correlate them with reported training sorties out of MountainHome Air Force Base ...

They had good reasons: From 1995 until 2002, for example, MountainHome was the home of B-1B bombers, which roar overhead at up to 115decibels ...

Your lawnmower, by contrast, chugs along at less than 100 decibels ...

A sonic boom caused by an American F-15 fighter jet carrying out asupersonic run was behind a mysterious "tremor" felt across Norfolk onThursday and not an earthquake, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.

Norfolk police received a flurry of calls shortly aftermidday from worried residents reporting a possible earth tremor - andthe strange event was the talk of the force's Wymondham headquarterswhere members of staff also felt the earth move.

But experts quickly moved to reassure local people that the tremorwas not an earthquake and was most likely to be a sonic boom, which iscaused by an object moving faster than sound, usually an aircraft.

Glenn Ford, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey, said:"It certainly wasn't an earthquake. From the observations I have beengiven, they are very consistent with sonic booms we have received fromthe area historically over the last 20 years. I cannot say for definitethat this was the cause, but looking at the evidence that would be themost likely source of the activity.

"We have scrutinised all the data from the nearest stations. For anearthquake to be felt so widely, as this has, it would have to bepretty large. Even if one of these stations had failed, we would haveseen evidence from others across central England.

"We have contacted the RAF but at this time unfortunately they havenot been able to corroborate that there has been a sonic boom. Thiscould come from an aircraft or even a falling satellite or meteorite."

A Norfolk police spokesman said: "We received a number of calls frompeople reporting a possible earth tremor in the Wymondham area. We feltthe tremor ourselves in the office. A member of the public suggested itwas caused by an aircraft breaking the sound barrier." The spokesmansaid there were not thought to be any reports of any serious damage.

Nicky Germaine, 22, was at home in Wicklewood when she felt thetremor at about 12.20pm. "It rattled my house and it opened my porchdoor," she said. "I just thought that a lorry had gone past but then Iturned on the radio and heard other people reporting similar stories.It was a bit weird. I thought it was an earth tremor."

Rosalind Ross, 60, was standing outside her home in Spooner Row whenshe felt the strange tremor. "I was standing outside the back door andthe ground really shook under my feet. It was so loud. There was a roarlike a fleet of beet lorries going past.

"It bothered me a little bit because I was standing on my own and the ground shook really violently up through my feet."

John Rix, proprietor of Poppa Johns barbers in Wymondham, said:"Three of us were cutting when we heard the front window shaking. Ihave been here 14 years and that window has never moved before. I saidit must be another earthquake but someone else said it was a sonicboom."

A Ministry of Defence (MoD) spokesman confirmed that the sonic boomwas caused by an American F-15 fighter jet carrying out a supersonicrun. "The aircraft from RAF Lakenheath was flying above 10,000ft at thetime of the run," the spokesman said.

An RAF Lakenheath spokeswoman confirmed there had been an aircraftin the area when the incident was reported, but said she was unable toconfirm what it was.

A possible sonic boom heard last week by residents acrosssoutheastern Missouri and eastern Arkansas could help researchersbetter understand earthquake hazard.

At 2:48 p.m. last Wednesday people for more than 200 miles, fromForrest City, Ark., to Cape Girardeau, felt what they thought was anearthquake.

Scientists at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information(CERI) at the University of Memphis in Tennessee know it was not.

Though scientists were reluctant to say what caused the boom, itmost probably resulted from an Air Force jet flying over the area.Whatever the reason, it created sound waves that helped the earthquakeresearchers.

The disturbance was first recorded on a seismic station in PemiscotBayou, in the lower part of the Bootheel. It then traveled southeast atabout 1,115 feet per second to a station in Lennox, Tenn., and waseventually recorded on all of the CERI's 100 seismic stations in theNew Madrid Fault Zone.

"(It moved) with the speed of sound in air," explained Dr. StephHorton, seismology research scientist. "The sound interacted with theground and we could see it each time it reached a station. The speed ofsound moving through the ground is much higher."

Sound's interaction with the ground is something CERI professor Dr.Charles Langston began studying in 2004, according to his Web site.Langston was not available for comment.

Langston's project explores, in part, the potential for acousticshock waves to be used to map soil structure, according to Horton.

The type of soil beneath a location can play a significant role in determining how well an area can withstand an earthquake.

The New Madrid zone has as many as 200 minor quakes a year and hasin the last 200 years suffered damaging earthquakes. These have beenfelt in an area up to 20 times greater than California earthquakesbecause seismic waves die out much more slowly here than on the WestCoast.

Scientists believe this is because the thick layers of soft soil,often found in flood plains, may amplify motion as it nears thesurface. Structures built on or near bedrock tend to experience lowerlevels of earthquake ground shaking.

Because soil structure can vary greatly from one location to thenext, seismologists say detailed mapping of an are's soil must be doneto know the true seismic hazard of an area. This is not somethingincluded in current National Seismic Hazard Maps.

Soil mapping is a time-consuming process, which uses imagingtechniques and requires a high concentration of borehole measurementsto be taken from the area being mapped. The years-long project iscurrently taking place in St. Louis and Memphis.

It may be possible to use sound wave pressure increases anddecreases to understand how quickly seismic waves will travel throughnear-surface soils, Horton said.

It appears last week's sonic boom started north of Poplar Bluff,Mo., which is on the outside of CERI's seismic instrument network,according to seismologists.

You'd have a tough time convincing residents of Twin Falls County'sWest End that the recent late-night mystery noises aren't coming fromthe Air Force ... The eastern edge of the Idaho Training Range is only40 miles from Castleford and Buhl, and a supersonic jet travels 40miles in 3 minutes ...

So West Enders are accustomed to things that go bump - and go bump loudly - in the night ...

"Usually we hear the explosions when the air is humid and cold, thustransmitting sound easier," said Filer farmer Bill Bitzenburg ... "Manytimes in the summer you see flashes then hear nothing, because of thewarm thin air" ...

In March 1997, a sonic boom was blamed for damaging theCastleford High School gym - $150,000 worth of damage ... The Air Forcedenied it was responsible and refused to pay compensation ...

But the incident transformed many Castleforders into amateur sonicboom experts, packing stopwatches so they could keep track of sonicbombs and correlate them with reported training sorties out of MountainHome Air Force Base ...

They had good reasons: From 1995 until 2002, for example, MountainHome was the home of B-1B bombers, which roar overhead at up to 115decibels ...

Your lawnmower, by contrast, chugs along at less than 100 decibels ...

Residents across the Magic Valley have beencalling and e-mailing NewsChannel 7 this week - saying it feels likethe earth is rumbling and shaking.

Seismologists say those tremors - didn't show up on their equipment.

So what could be causing the shaking?

Dispatchers in Jerome say Tuesday night dozens of calls came in fromacross the Magic Valley - callers were not sure what was shaking therehomes.

"It was various from people thinking there was someone on top oftheir house, to someone breaking in, to generally just the houseshaking," dispatcher Jon Frisbey, Dispatcher said.

Taylor Hunsaker felt the shaking at his home in Kimberly around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

"I was actually almost asleep and it got me out of bed," he said."It sounded like a rumbling and thought it was getting closer and thehouse was shaking. I didn't know what the heck was going on"

Hunsaker says the rumble has been the talk of the town. He says manypeople wonder if it was an aftershock from the earthquake in Wells lastmonth.

But the US Geological Survey says nothing showed up on seismographs.

A BSU Science professor has his own theory.

"I call them mud quakes," BSU seismologist Jim Zollweg said. "Ibelieve this to be from water withdrawal from the sediments on therock."

Zollweg says a sudden shift of sediments underground can feel likean earthquake but the movement is not picked up by seismographs.

"Since its not occurring in the rock like a real natural earthquakethe seismic waves don't get generated in the rock and stations as closeas 20 miles away don't pick up the disturbance at all," he said.

Right now, it is just a hypothesis but Zollweg plans to look into iteven more - because he says this is not a new phenomenon for the MagicValley.

"Over the years I've had probably on the average of two to three calls a year about this kind of event," he said.

No damage was reported as a result of the rumbles.

Comment: Another sonic boom from an overhead meteorite explosion perhaps?

Comet Hale-Bopp amid its glory on March 17, 1997. The comet still shines in the outer solar system, but at a mere 20th magnitude.

The team imaged Hale-Bopp over three nights last October, when thecomet was nearly 26 astronomical units (2.4 billion miles) from theSun. At 20th magnitude, it wasn't much to look at, just a smudge abouta dozen pixels across as captured using the 2.3-meter AustralianNational University telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory. But theimages were enough for the researchers to conclude that the nucleus isstill releasing carbon monoxide gas into a coma more than 100,000 mileswide.

Every week, the Opinion section presents an essay from TheTimes's archive by a columnist or contributor that we hope sheds lighton current news or provides a window on the past.

This week's offering comes from Arthur C. Clarke, the sciencefiction novelist, who died on Wednesday. In 1994, he urged Op-Edreaders to look to the skies--or risk going the way of the dinosaurs.

Sunday, August 14, 1994

Op-Ed: Killer Comets Are Out There. Now What?

By ARTHUR C. CLARKE

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - At 0946 G.M.T. on the morning of 11 September,in the exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of theinhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball, appear in the easternsky. . . . Moving at 50 kilometers a second, a thousand tons of rockand metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a fewflaming moments the labor of centuries. The cities of Padua und Veronawere wiped from the face of the Earth; and the last glories of Venicesank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic camethundering landward after the hammer blow from space. . . .

After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and aunity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it wasrealized, might not occur again for a thousand years -- but it mightoccur tomorrow. . . . So began Project Spaceguard.

-- "Rendezvous with Rama," 1973

Soon after the last fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashedinto Jupiter last month, the monsoon skies above my home in Colombocleared momentarily and I hurried to set up my 14-inch Celestrontelescope. I didn't really expect to see anything, so I could hardlybelieve my eyes when I clearly observed a line of dark bruises spreadout across the planet's southern hemisphere.

Some imaginative souls suggested that the comet might have acatastrophic impact on Jupiter, but its effect will be largelycosmetic. And it will certainly have no effect on Earth, despite theinevitable alarmist warnings by religious fanatics. But the spectacularcollision between the newly discovered comet with the solar system'slargest planet has brought sudden new attention to a genuine threat:the chance that a rogue comet or asteroid could strike Earth, withpossibly devastating consequences.

As a result, the fictional "Project Spaceguard" I described in my1973 novel has now begun in reality -- if Congress approves anamendment to the 1994 NASA authorization bill requesting the spaceagency to identify and catalogue within 10 years "the orbitalcharacteristics of all comets and asteroids greater than one kilometerin diameter in orbit around the Sun that cross the orbit of the Earth."

Though this amendment was prompted by the Shoemaker-Levy comet, itis really the result of an "International Near-Earth-Object DetectionWorkshop" organized by NASA in 1992. With a nod to "Rendezvous withRama," the official report of this workshop was entitled the SpaceguardSurvey.

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of thesedevelopments, in view of his famous remark on hearing of a meteoritelanding in New England: "I'd rather believe that two Yankee professorslied than that stones fell from the sky." Certainly no one could haveimagined how quickly and how dramatically a cosmic event so apparentlyremoved from everyday affairs would become prime-time news.

In view of the number of collisions that have taken place in thiscentury alone -- most notably, a comet or asteroid that exploded in1908 in Siberia with the force of 20 hydrogen bombs -- there is a verygood case for a global survey of the possible danger, particularly asthe shared cost among nations would be negligible compared to mostnational defense budgets. (Incidentally, historians might also beadvised to undertake some surveying. Just as the numerous meteor-impactcraters on Earth were never found until we started looking for them, sothere may have been disasters in history that have been misinterpreted.Sodom and Gomorrah have a good claim to be meteorite casualties; howmany others are there?)

Many people would probably prefer not to know of impending cosmicdoom, if nothing could be done to avert it. Yet given sufficientwarning time -- which we hope Spaceguard would provide -- we should beable to develop the technology necessary to ward off, or even destroy,such intruders from outer space.

There are at least three ways in which oncoming asteroids, or theircometary cousins, might be deflected. The first is the brute forceapproach: nuke the beast. A sufficiently large bomb -- probably in thegigaton class, or the equivalent of about a billion tons of highexplosive -- could split an intruder into many fragments. This wouldnot necessarily be a Good Thing, because some of the pieces might stillbe heading straight toward us. The atmosphere, however, would burn upmost of the smaller fragments, and at least instead of massivedevastation in one area there might be minimal damage spread overnumerous sites.

Needless to say, such a pre-emptive strike is advocated byenthusiastic and currently underemployed bomb designers. Perhaps abetter solution is one I adopted in another novel, "The Hammer of God,"in which a potential killer asteroid is detected a year before it willcollide with Earth, giving astronauts barely enough time to make arendezvous and deflect it into a harmless orbit by mounting rocketthrusters on its surface.

Given enough warning time -- at least several years -- this could bedone with very modest amounts of power. An initial deflection of only afew centimeters, at the beginning of a multimillion-kilometer journey,could insure that the asteroid steered well clear of us.

Although the orbit of a solid body like an asteroid can becalculated centuries in advance (once the object has been discovered!)the rocket-thruster solution might not work so well with comets. Theseflying icebergs warm up as they approach the sun and begin to vent gas.The resulting "jet propulsion" makes their future position uncertain,so if we ever have to deflect an oncoming comet, we would have to allowa very significant safety margin.

An even more elegant solution has been proposed by scientists atNASA and elsewhere: "solar sailing." The plan would be to attach a hugelightweight mirror of metal foil to the comet or asteroid, capturingthe minute but continuous pressure exerted by sunlight. Unfortunately,the acceleration produced by this feeble pressure would be so minimalthat years, even decades, of warning time might be required.

All these solutions would require a vast investment in newtechnology. But people who say "Why waste money on space?" shouldremember the dinosaurs, whose extinction it is now widely believed wascaused -- or at least accelerated -- by the impact of a giant meteoritearound 65 million years ago.

And NASA's increased commitment to identifying threatening bodies inspace could have another benefit: it could give new inspiration toAmerica's flagging space program, and restore some of the lost magic ofthe Age of Apollo.

Sheikh Salman bin Jabor al-Thani, head of the astronomicaldepartment at Qatar Scientific Club, said yesterday the club believedthat the meteor had hit Qatar in the 1940s. The club started a search for evidence three years ago because of stories of a "falling star" told by people of that era.The club took the help of Google Earth in the search. They succeeded inlocating five craters, which were just visible on the surface.

In 1983 Richard Stothers and Michael Rampino of NASA published alist of all ancient volcanic eruptions known from Mediterraneanhistorical sources. Their list included a persistent dust veil or dryfog which darkened the sky for about a year in AD 536--37, bringingabout cold, drought and food shortage in the Mediterranean area or, asit has since been claimed, all over the northern hemisphere. Especiallyfollowing two popular books devoted to the dust veil by David Keys andMike Baillie, it has been acclaimed as the worst climatic disaster inrecorded history. In the most wide-ranging scenarios, the year 536 isseen as a watershed moment between the ancient and modern worlds,bringing about economic decline, population movements, politicalunrest, and ultimately the collapse of civilizations.

In a lengthy article written in 2004 and just to be published in the Byzantinist journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers' 2005 issue*,I have gone through all the available physical and written evidence forthe 536 event. The inevitable conclusion from the ancient literarysources is that the historical impact of the cloud must have beenextremely limited. On the other hand, some assumptions about thecloud's physical nature that have hitherto been taken for grantedshould be re-examined. In the following, I give a brief summary of mypaper.

Physical evidence for the 536 event is derived from two mainsources: tree rings and acid layers in Greenland ice. The tree ringsshow 536 and the following ten years as a period of very slow growthfor Scandinavian pines, North European oaks and several North Americanspecies. However, the contours of a sudden catastrophe cannot bedirectly read from the tree ring evidence. In many series, the drop in536 is followed by a recovery in 537--38 and then again by an even moreserious plunge. In most cases, the worst years are around 540, and inSiberia 543. In southern Chile, the trough is in 540, while inArgentina there was dramatic growth reduction only after 540, with aminimum in 548. In Tasmania, the tree growth declined between 546 and552.

Thus, although the year 536 was certainly a very bad growing seasonin many parts of the world, it is situated in a decade-long downturn inthe climate of the Northern Hemisphere and is separated from the reallyworst seasons by 3--7 years. Moreover, and perhaps even more seriously,in the Scandinavian pines as in the oaks and North American trees, itis possible to see a long-term growth decline during the early part ofthe sixth century which is matched by an equally slow rise in theaverage growth during the second half of the century. This would placethe years around 540 as the lowest point in a slow climatic cycle.While it does not disprove a climatic anomaly in 536, all thisnevertheless suggests that the link between the dark cloud and treegrowth is not as straightforward as might be wished. Thedendrochronological maxim "trees do not lie" may be true, but neitherdo they seem to provide unequivocal answers to the questions whichhistorians would like to pose to them.

Historical eruptions are usually attested as acid layers inGreenland ice. In the previously published studies, all the relevantsections of the Greenland ice cores for the mid-sixth century have beeneither missing, flawed or poorly dated. Recently, Danish scholars havereported that a major eruption can be dated to the early spring of 528.It is unclear whether it might be possible to redate the whole sequenceof ice layers by a few years, matching the new attested eruption withthe 536 event. Any conclusions therefore must remain tentative, but sofar we have to admit that no acid layer sufficient for a major volcaniceruption has been confirmed around 536. That is why the cloud has beenattributed to the impact of a comet. This hypothesis is not confirmedby any direct evidence either.

Archaeological evidence does not help us assess the consequences ofpossible crop failures around 536. Recent archaeological work serves tostress the need for a regional approach: economic and demographicdevelopments may differ in neighboring regions. The whole western partof the Roman empire was in clear decline already in the fifth century.The Persian devastations in northern Syria, combined with recurrentearthquakes and epidemics, would probably suffice to explain anysixth-century economic decline in the Byzantine Near East.

The results of my inquiry into the written sources are relativelystraightforward: although the cloud occasioned confusion and cropfailure at the time it was seen, its effects did not last long after ithad dissipated. Compared with almost all other contemporarycivilizations around the world, the circumstances in the Mediterraneanarea are extremely well documented. The literary sources which recordthe darkness of 536/7 all seem to consider it a temporary misfortune.Among the innumerable earthquakes, droughts, plagues, swarms oflocusts, and slaughters which are listed by the historians of thistime, the dark cloud was not counted as a particular catastrophe.Shortage of food was a recurrent phenomenon in the ancient world, andpeople were used to it, however intense the short-term suffering mightbe.

For example, two Italian sources, Cassiodorus and the LiberPontificalis, attest continuing problems with the harvest in 537, whichis not surprising if the fog persisted until the summer. Immediateeffects of the event are not reported after that. The historianProcopius for his part does not mention the crop failures of 536/7. Hesays that outside besieged Rome the Goths were also starving, but herather seems to give the credit for it to a successful Byzantine navalblockade. In contrast, the historian describes at great length aterrible famine in Italy in 539. However, he is quite explicit that itwas due to the fields being left uncultivated because of the war. Alittle later he returns to the subject of food shortage among theGoths, again insinuating that the lack of supplies was a logisticproblem. He does not give a hint that climatic conditions might havebeen blamed for continual bad harvests.

Though these sources leave no doubt that a mysterious fog was seenin an area which extended at least from Italy to Asia Minor and causedbad harvests there for one or two years, they all seem to treat it as atemporary bad omen, not as the beginning of a long period ofunfavorable climatic conditions. Of course, the writers might not havenoted a slight drop in average temperatures, and might perhaps not havecared to record a change in prevailing winds or precipitation. However,if the direct consequences of such underlying factors for agriculturehad been grave enough to undermine the economic well-being of theempire, we would expect somewhat more attention being paid to them bycontemporary writers.

Thus, the combined force of the available evidence irresistiblyshows that, whatever happened around 536, its historical implicationsremained very limited, at least in the Mediterranean area. On the otherhand, the sources report interesting, though sometimes conflicting,details of the fog. Although the haze has been called a dry fog or dustveil ever since 1984, a passage from the eyewitness antiquarian writerJohn Lydus which has hitherto been neglected rather suggests that thefog was damp. This is not decisive because it can reasonably be claimedthat Lydus may not have been able to observe its actual composition.However, he also asserts that the fog was seen only in Europe, and itis more difficult to discredit this report out of hand. It would be inclear contrast to the common scholarly assumption that the cloud was aglobal or at least a hemispherical phenomenon. Remarkably, all theother literary sources mention the fog only for an area around Italyand Asia Minor.

Cold and drought are attested in other parts of the world but notthe persistent fog. Chinese sources record that the star Canopus wasnot seen at the spring and fall equinoxes in 536. Although this mightbe taken to refer to reduced atmospheric transparency (as many scholarshave assumed), it seems a rather understated way to describe a darknesswhich continued for a year. It is especially odd if it was the factorwhich caused summer frosts, drought and widespread famine, dulyrecorded in Chinese historical works between 535 (sic) and 538. Atleast two possibilities emerge: either the Chinese did not mention thefog because opaque skies are not unusual in northern China due to thefrequent desert storms there, or the fog was tropospheric and localizedin the Mediterranean area. While zonal winds would have spread astratospheric fog over the northern latitudes within a few weeks ormonths, a tropospheric fog (volcanic or not) might very well haveattenuated before reaching China. The problem remains that notropospheric fog of such duration has been observed in historical times.

However, if we accept the possibility that the fog may have beenseen in northern China though it was not clearly recorded, it mightalso be possible to explain Lydus' account in a different way. Allthose areas for which the fog is securely attested (Italy,Constantinople) lie above 35 degrees of northern latitude, perhaps evenabove 40 degrees, depending on how we interpret Procopius' report. Thesame is true of northern Mesopotamia (ca. 37° N). In contrast, thoseareas further east which Lydus claims did not witness the fog (Persia,India) all lie below 40 or even 35 degrees northern latitude, and thisalso applies to most of China. Thus, we might actually have a cloudwhich could be seen only at latitudes north of the Mediterranean and inthe very north of China. Such a rather abrupt and globally uniformcutoff latitude falling between 30 and 40 degrees has been observed forstratospheric aerosol veils stemming from large eruptions of northernvolcanoes, notably Lakagigar (Iceland, 1783), Ksudach (Kamchatka, 1907)and Katmai (Alaska, 1912). For example, the dust cloud from Katmai wasseen and measured at Bassour, Algeria (36° N), at Simla, India (31° N)and at two US observatories (34-36° N), but not at Helwan, Egypt (30°N).

If we interpret Lydus' text in this manner, disregarding his reportof the moist fog and assuming that the missing or misdated acid layersin the ice cores can be explained somehow, it would add a new dimensionto the volcano hypothesis. It would actually support the suggestionmade by Richard Stothers that the mystery cloud derived from a farnorthern volcano, and not from a tropical one like Rabaul (New Guinea),Krakatau (Indonesia) or El Chichón (Mexico), which have been earliersuspects. The observed decline of tree growth in South America in the540s might seem to be at odds with this. However, it has not yet beenestablished whether a high-latitude eruption could have global climaticeffects. The issue is currently debated.

We cannot check the scientific accuracy of Lydus' reports. They maymislead us, but at the very least they invite us to re-examine thescientific evidence for the event. It remains true that the Greenlandice cores have so far produced little proof of volcanic activity around536, and that the tree rings are surprisingly ambiguous about climaticvariation in different parts of the world between 535--552. Two mainalternatives emerge. The dark cloud may have originated from a northernvolcano, being visible only at latitudes north of the Mediterranean, orthe fog may have been locally more restricted, perhaps damp,originating from a totally unknown source. As a tropospheric fog ofsuch duration would be quite exceptional, the first alternative perhapsseems at present more likely. Further ice cores may prove or disproveit in the future. However, for those who are as of yet not convinced bythe volcano hypothesis, the second alternative might appear worthserious consideration.

It's lucky for the good burghers of Ullapoolin Scotland that they weren't around 1.2 billion years ago, because itwas around then that the biggest meteorite ever to hit the BritishIsles would have made a bit of a dent in local house prices.

That's according to the combined forces of the University ofOxford and the University of Aberdeen, who say that "unusual rockformations" previously thought to have volcanic origins are actuallythe debris ejected from a meteorite strike which threw material over anarea 50km across.

The volcanic theory has always had geologists scratching theirheads, since there are "no volcanic vents or other volcanic sedimentsnearby". The researchers moved in for the kill by taking rock samplesin 2006, and have now published their revelations in the journal Geology.

Ken Amor of Oxford Uni's Department of Earth Sciences, explained:"Chemical testing of the rocks found the characteristic signature ofmeteoritic material, which has high levels of the key element iridium,normally only found in low concentrations in surface rocks on Earth. Wefound more evidence when we examined the rocks under a microscope;tell-tale microscopic parallel fractures that also imply a meteoritestrike."

Professor John Parnell, head of Geology & Petroleum Geology atthe University of Aberdeen, chipped in with: "These rocks are superblydisplayed on the west coast of Scotland, and visited by numerousstudent parties each year. We're very lucky to have them available forstudy, as they can tell us much about how planetary surfaces, includingMars, become modified by large meteorite strikes. Building up theevidence has been painstaking, but has resulted in proof of the largestmeteorite strike known in the British Isles."

Amor added: "If there had been human observers in Scotland 1.2billion years ago they would have seen quite a show. The massive impactwould have melted rocks and thrown up an enormous cloud of vapour thatscattered material over a large part of the region around Ullapool. Thecrater was rapidly buried by sandstone which helped to preserve theevidence."

The researchers hope that the evidence they've gathered will helpthem to "understand the ancient impacts that shaped the surface ofother planets, such as Mars", Amor concluded.

Saturn's curious moon Enceladus appears to have the same chemicalmakeup as a comet, according to the latest results from the Cassiniprobe. That's a big surprise, as Enceladus should have formed in verydifferent conditions from those of comets.

Heat radiates from the entire length of 150-kilometre-long fractures on the south pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus

"The organics are clearly there in abundance beyond what weexpected," says INMS lead scientist Hunter Waite of the SouthwestResearch Institute in San Antonio, Texas, US. "And the composition isvery like the composition of a comet."

"This is very exciting," says Cassini scientist Julie Castillo ofNASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. "Itindicates that Enceladus and comets were made of the same initialmaterials, and/or affected by similar internal processes," she told New Scientist.

That is rather puzzling because comets are thought to have formedfar from the Sun, out in the region of Uranus and Neptune, says INMSco-investigator Roger Yelle of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US.Enceladus, on the other hand, is thought to have grown within the"Saturnian subnebula" - the cloud of gas that coalesced into Saturn andits major moons.

"The temperature and pressure should have been very different, so you should get different gases," Yelle told New Scientist.

Liquid water

Enceladus is almost certainly not a captured giant comet, butcometary stuff might have been incorporated into the moon. Ices fromthe outer solar system might have infiltrated the Saturnian subnebula,suggests William McKinnon of Washington University in St Louis,Missouri, US.

Or comets might have hit Enceladus during a period of upheaval in the solar system around 4 billion years ago called the late heavy bombardment.

During the flyby, Cassini's infrared camera mapped the heat emissions of the south polemore clearly than before, showing that a great quantity of heat iscoming out along the four fractures called "tiger stripes".Temperatures along these stripes are higher than their surroundings byup to 90 °Celsius.

Life's ingredients

"The closer we look, the higher the temperatures," says John Spencerof the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, who workson the infrared detector. "It is entirely possible that there is liquidwater below the surface of these fractures."

"We see on Enceladus the three basic requirements for the origin oflife," says Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado in Boulder,principal investigator of another Cassini instrument, the UltravioletImaging Spectrograph (UVIS). "There is water - although it may not beliquid - plus organics and heat."

Cassini will revisit Saturn's comet impersonator in August and October, when it might fly even closer to the moon.

It did for quite a few Bridlington residents who contacted the Free Press to find out if we had another earthquake.

In fact, local phone lines were red hot as friends and neighboursrang each other to see if they had also heard and felt a loud thud orbang.

Dave Garrity was at home in Wentworth Road at 8pm when he heard anoise like someone jumping up and down on the top of his bay window.

"I went out to have a look and found practically the whole street had come outside to see what was going on."

Friends living in Brookland Road rang to say they had also heard andfelt the noise and his mother-in-law who lives in Greame Road alsocalled to say she wondered if there had been another minor earthquake.

Across town Patrick Tibble was watching TV at his home at the top of Bempton Lane.

"I thought my six-year-old daughter Ruby had fallen out of bed or something. I went upstairs to find her fast asleep," he said.

He also rang friends and others rang him about the same experience at various addresses across Bridlington.

The sonic boom theory from some high speed military aircraft was a favourite explanation.

The police and Humberside Fire and Rescue Service received a fewcalls from people about the mystery noise, and coastguards confirmedthere had been a military air exercise going on over or near the coastlast Wednesday evening

"A sound barrier boom is the most likely explanation," said a spokesman for the fire and rescue service.

An ancient remnant from the formation of the solar system may have lit up the sky over Kingston this week.

The Whig-Standard and a renowned local astronomer received reports of a glowing object falling to earth Monday evening.

The skywatchers reported seeing what appeared to be a glowing objectin the northwest sky that was plunging toward the ground around 10 p.m.

Jonathan Craig was driving westbound on Highway 401, passing throughKingston on his way home to Toronto, when he and his girlfriend spotteda bright object in the sky to their right, north of the highway.

"I said, 'What is that?' and before I could say it lookslike a plane, it went straight down," Craig said yesterday. "It lookedlike it spiralled down."

Craig said he has seen many meteors.

"I have seen tons of shooting stars and this was weird," he said.

Astronomer and author Terence Dickinson, who lives in Yarker, saidhe had a call from a man who reported a similar observation at the sametime Monday night.

Dickinson believes the sightings are of a larger version of what most people call a shooting star or falling star.

A bolide meteor is a fragment of material that might be as large as a golf ball plunging through Earth's atmosphere.

"This stuff is ancient," he said. "It's from the formation of the solar system.

"Certainly it could be mistaken for something crashing."

In most cases, these large shooting stars burn up as they passthrough the atmosphere and nothing is left to strike the ground,Dickinson said. As the particle enters the atmosphere, air frictioncauses it to glow and give off a trail of gas and debris.

Dickinson said often the streaking object disappears behind a treeline, adding to the perception it is a plane crashing to the ground."It looked like it went out of view [behind the trees]," Craig said. Inrare cases, the object is large enough that a portion survives thefall. A piece that comes to Earth is described as a meteorite. Findinga remnant would be valuable.

"It's a little chunk of primordial material," Dickinson said.

Three weeks ago, the physics and astronomy department at theUniversity of Western Ontario in London captured video footage of asimilar sighting.

The department says the footage shows a meteor crashing to Earthnear Parry Sound. No one has yet been able to find remnants of theobject.

Over the past few years, while sott.net has been tracking theincreasing flux of fireballs and meteorites entering the earth'satmosphere, we have been, by turns, amused and horrified at theignorant reactions and declarations that issue from academia and themedia regarding these incursions. A few years ago, we read that "thisis a 'once in a hundred years' event!" Not long after it was a "once ina lifetime" event. Still later, after a lot more incidents it became a"once in a decade" event. More recently, it has been admitted in somequarters that meteorites hit the ground (as opposed to safely burningup in the atmosphere) several times a year! And of course, we havediscovered the fact that the governments of our planet are well awarethat there are atmospheric explosions from such bodies numerous times ayear. We have also learned in this series that the frequent reports ofunusual booms and shaking of the ground is often due to such overheadexplosions. Yet the media steadfastly refuses to honestly address thisissue, though we have noted a plethora of recent articles presentingopposing academic arguments designed to put the populace back to sleep,to reassure them that there is nothing to worry about, that such thingsonly happen every 100,000 years or so, and certainly, the Space WatchProgram is going to find all the possible impactors and take care ofthings.

Leading U.S. scientists called on Congress Thursday to make sure thenext president does not do what they say the George W. BushAdministration has done: censor, suppress and falsify importantenvironmental and health research. [...]

Among the more than 15,000 government scientists signing onto thestatement are Harold Varmus, preesident of Memorial Sloan-KetteringCancer Centre and former director of the National Institutes of Health(NIH); and Anthony Robbins, professor of medicine at Tufts Universityand former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safetyand Health.

"Although surely the worst, the Bush Administration is not thefirst, nor will it be the last administration to mistreat and misusescience and scientists," Robbins said. The White House itself has beendirectly involved in the suppression and falsification of science,Robbins stressed.

But interference from the White House is just part of the problem,said Francesca Grifo, a former government researcher and now a directorat the Union of Concerned Scientists. Industry lobbyists are all overgovernment agencies, trying to influence research that will impacttheir corporations, she said. "These special interest groups are beinggiven access at the highest level."

"Government scientists have had their findings subjected tocensorship and misrepresentation," said Kurt Gottfried, professor ofphysics at Cornell University and a member of the Union of ConcernedScientists. "The public and Congress have often been deprived ofaccurate and candid scientific information."

"The pursuit of science in an open society has had a long andfruitful tradition in America," Gottfried said. "Unfortunately, thistradition has been violated in recent years by the government itself."

Here is a list of beliefs in the biomedical and climate sciencesthat must not be questioned if you're applying for a government grant:

- That global warming is caused by humans;

- That AIDS is caused by a virus;

- That radiation, cigarette smoke and other toxins are dangerous in proportion to their strength, no matter how small the dose;

- That heart disease is caused by saturated fats;

- That cancer is caused by mutations.

This is part of a list offered by a University of Washingtonprofessor of surgery, Donald W. Miller, who is a heart surgeon at theVA Medical Center in Seattle. Miller believes that all the above ideasmay be false, and ought to be tested. [...]

But much of science runs on government money. Some people find thestink of bias only in private money, and see government as free of it,but they are mistaken. Government likes certain beliefs. To get itsmoney, you have to get the approval of the scientists it selects, andyou are less likely to get it if they think your idea wrong.

What that means, Miller says, is that "If you say low doses ofradiation aren't bad for you, or that global warming is due tovariations in the sun, you can't get funded."

He says this happened to University of California scientist PeterDues-berg, who challenged the viral theory of AIDS, and to Harvard'sWillie Soon, who challenged the pollution theory of global warming, andto others. In a paper published in 2007 in the Journal of Information Ethics, Miller argued that conformity is built into the system of government grants. [...]

In 2005, in the scientific journal Cellular and Molecular Biology,Pollack made an argument similar to Miller's. American science, hewrote, has become "a culture of believers" whose rule is, "just keep itsafe and get your funding."

For science, the result has not been good. [...]

Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, argued famously thatscience progresses in revolutionary bursts, in which the "dominantparadigm" is overturned. But what if the supporters of the dominantparadigm are the people vetting your application?

We most certainly can see that the issue of meteorite, cometary andasteroid impacts on our planet, and their true potential danger to eachand every one of us, must be added to this list of unfunded research.

This is a very bad and dangerous state of affairs. As Victor Clube wrote in his letter to SOTT.net:

First, I should say your references to the (cosmically complacent)paleoclimate community and to my otherwise unread narrative report tothe USAF european office strike a very considerable chord with me.After all neither Ms Victoria Cox nor your good self can be aware howvery much Bill and I had reason to appreciate the timely injection ofUSAF funds at a time when the line of research we championed appeared to be successfully closed down by the UK scientific establishment. Thus wewere both in turn obliged to relinquish our career posts at the RoyalObservatory, Edinburgh on account of this line of research - which gave rise to our reincarnation at a more tolerant haven namely my alma mater (Oxford).

Also, whilst I broadly accept your commentary regarding the role of"national elites" in the face of near-Earth threats, I am quite certainthe elites in practice currently know VERY "much LESS than they let on"and that the situation for humanity is dire. Any comfort you may drawfrom the opposite opinion seems to me to be entirely misplaced. Thusalthough the globally modest efforts to assess the NEO threat withtelescopes by a few semi-enlightened national administrations (eg USA)or by a few private enterprises (eg Gates) are certainly to becommended, I look upon this aspect of the NEO threat as basicallyintermittent and therefore more or less symbolic so far as generallymore urgent and still largely undetected low mass NEO flux (which isdemonstrably climatological in its effect) is concerned. Thisparticular threat (evidently responsible for our planet's evolvingglacial/interglacial condition during the past 3 million years) is ofcourse _fundamentally_ ignored by the current Body Scientific and henceby most of humanity as well.

And so, it seems, we here at SOTT.net, and the brave souls with thegood of humanity at heart, are on their own, opposed by the governmentsthat are supposed to be in place to look after the interests of theirpeople.

Of course, the question arises: what led to this general and overallblindness on the part of the people we look to for interpretation andexplanation of our reality? How can the people who write textbooks,teach in schools, even at the highest level, be so ignorant? Theconsequences of this ignorance are, after all, detrimental to everyonefor many reasons, not the least of which is simple survival in a ratherhostile environment.

The events that have been covered so far in this series have led usto understand that there have been many times when it is highlyprobable that the earth - or parts thereof - was bombarded withmeteorites or exploding aerial cometary fragments. These eventsoccurred, and were probably related to, periods of great stress on theenvironment and humanity as a whole. Climate changes brought floods,droughts, extreme temperatures, crop failures and famine. Thesepressures may have caused lowered disease resistance for givenpopulations, and it is also conjectured that extra-terrestrialbombardments may have carried disease pathogens. Impacts or crustaldisturbances in distant places could have placed stresses on thegeological structures so that outgassings from fissures, the ocean, orlakes may have poisoned large numbers of people, not to mention therecord of tsunamis that is now called into question. Do we know, forexample, that the Christmas tsunami causing earthquake near Malaysiawas not impact induced? No, we don't. And we can't trust either ourgovernments or the news media - or even most of academia who owe theirlivelihoods to the government - to tell us the truth.

Why do they lie to us?

Well, the main reason is rather simple: it's all about control. Allof these things, taken together, place intolerable stresses on thehuman social organism and, as is typical for human beings, this bringson a crisis of faith.

When the world shows itself to be a hostile environment, when theenvironment suggests that there is no god and humanity is cast adriftin an uncaring cosmos, most people cannot tolerate this; theydesperately need to restore their belief in something "out there" thatis going to save them, which means that someone has to be blamed forthe disasters: a scapegoat. Because, of course, if you can find someoneor something to blame for calamity, you can continue in your illusionthat "God is in his heaven and - but for the evil acts of the chosenscapegoat - all would be right with the world." Otherwise, the tensionand anxiety of having no control (even vicarious, via prayer or ritual)over the hostile environment, would be unbearable. I'm sure that younotice that this also relieves the individual of any responsibility aswell, so this approach works in all kinds of situations.

We are going to examine this problem in some depth further on, butfor now, I would like the reader to become acquainted with the facts.The following is The List, by no means exhaustive, of all the incidentsI have been able to uncover of meteorite, asteroid, or cometary impactsthat have caused death and destruction, property damage, or were nearmisses. Major parts of The List are extracted from the work of John S.Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar and PlanetaryLaboratory, Codirector of the NASA/University of Arizona SpaceEngineering Research Center, and Commissioner of the Arizona StateSpace Commission, in specific, his books entitled Rain of Iron and Ice and Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth. In this latter volume, he writes:

The most intensively studied impact phenomenon, impact cratering, isof limited importance, due to the rarity and large mean time betweenevents for crater-forming impacts. Almost all events causing propertydamage and lethality are due to bodies less than 100 meters indiameter, almost all of which, except for the very largest andstrongest, are fated to explode in the atmosphere. ... [W]e are forcedto conclude that the complex behavior of smaller bodies is closelyrelevant to the threat actually experienced by contemporarycivilization.

Based on the data he collected, Lewis noted that:

[O]n the century time scale, firestorm ignition and direct blastdamage by rare, strong, deeply penetrating bodies are the most commonthrats to human life, with average fatality rates of about 250 peopleper year. ... On a 1000-year scale, the most severe single event, whichis usually a 10 to 100 megaton Tunguska-type airburst, accounts formost of the total fatalities. On longer time scales, regionalimpact-triggered tsunamis become the most dangerous events. ...Theexact impactor threshold size for global effects remains poorlydetermined. [...]

Perhaps most interesting is the implication that the large majorityof lethal events (not of the number of fatalities) are caused by bodiesthat are so small, so faint, and so numerous that the cost of theeffort required to find, track, predict, and intercept them exceeds thecost of the damage incurred by ignoring them. [Lewis, 1999]

Unfortunately, Prof. Lewis did not have to hand the information presented by Mike Baillie in his book New Light on the Black Death, nor did he consider the global events of 12000 years ago revealed by the work of maverick scientists, Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith.If he had added the estimated numbers of fatalities from those eventsinto his calculations, it might not have decided that the small, faint,and numerous bodies were so easily ignored. Regarding impacts fromhistory, Lewis writes in Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth:

Many ancient sources from many cultures treat comets as literal,physical harbingers of doom. Such phenomena as the burning of citiesand the overthrow of buildings and walls by aerial events are mentionedmany times in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese records, but there isno evidence of physical understanding of the nature of the bombardingobjects or their effects until quite recently. [...]

There is indeed a language problem in understanding the ancientreports, but it is largely a matter of the lack of an appropriatetechnical vocabulary in the older writings. [...] In certainlocations and periods, especially in medieval Europe, all unusualheavenly events were interpreted as signs sent by God. Therefore, thesurviving accounts are strongly biased toward explaining the moralpurpose of these events, not their physical nature. Suchfundamental information as exact date and time, exact location, placeof appearance of the phenomenon in the sky, its duration and physicalextent, luminosity, precise nature of the damage done, and the likewere generally regarded as unimportant, and therefore rarely recordedfor posterity. [...] Even in 20th century newspapers, bolide explosionsmay be described (and indexed) as "mysterious explosions," aerialblasts, aerolites, aeroliths, bolides, earthquakes, fireballs,meteorites, meteors, shocks, thunder, and so on. [...]

Reports of meteorite falls, often with consequent damage, extend back to the fall of a "thunderstone" in Crete in 1478 BC,described by Malchus in the Chronicle of Paros. The earliest Biblicalsource is the account of a lethal fall of stones in ... Joshua 10:11.[...]

Other ancient reports in the West are found in the writings ofPausanius, Plutarch, Livy, Pindar, Valerius Maximus, Caesar, and manyothers. The report of a great fall of black dust at Constantinople in 472 BC, perhaps the result of a high-altitude airburst, is documented by Procopius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Theophanes, and others.

Colonel S. P. Worden has called to my attention the following passage in The History of the Franks, written by Bishop Gregory of Tours:

"580 AD in Louraine, one morning before the dawningof the day, a great light was seen crossing the heavens, falling towardthe east. A sound like that of a tree crashing down was heard over allthe countryside, but it could surely not have been any tree, since itwas heard more than fifty miles away... the city of Bordeaux was badlyshaken by an earthquake ... a supernatural fire burned down villagesabout Bordeaux. It took hold so rapidly that houses and eventhreshing-floors with all their grain were burned to ashes. Since therewas absolutely no other visible cause of the fire, it must havehappened by divine will. The city of Orleans also burned with so greata fire that even the rich lost almost everything."

Astronomers who have sought documentary evidence of ancientastronomical phenomena (eclipses, comets, fireballs, etc.) have foundthat East Asian records are far superior to European records for manycenturies. Kevin Yau has searched Chinese records and found manyreports of deaths and injuries (Yau et al., 1994). The Chinese recordsof lethal impact events include the death of 10 victims from ameteorite fall in 616 AD, an "iron rain" in the O-chia district in the 14th century that killed people and animals, several soldiers injured by the fall of a "large star" in Ho-t'ao in 1369, and many others. The most startling is a report of an event in early 1490in Ch'ing-yang, Shansi, in which many people were killed when stones"fell like rain." Of the three known surviving reports of this event,one says that "over 10,000 people" were killed, and one says that"several tens of thousands" were killed.

On 14 September 1511, a meteorite fall in Cremona, Lombardy, Italy, reportedly killed a monk, several birds, and a sheep. In the 17th centurywe find reports of a monk in Milano, Italy, who was struck by ameteorite that severed his femoral artery, causing him to bleed todeath, and of two sailors killed on shipboard by a meteorite fall inthe Indian Ocean.

In addition to these shipboard fatalities, there have been severalstriking accounts of near disasters involving impacts very close toships. Near midnight of 24 February 1885, at a latitude of 37 degrees N and a longitude of 170 degrees 15 minutes E in the North Pacific, the crew of the barque Innerwich,en route from Japan to Vancouver, saw the sky turn fiery red: "A largemass of fire appeared over the vessel, completely blinding thespectators; and, as it fell into the sea some 50 yards to leeward, itcaused a hissing sound, which was heard above the blast, and made thevessel quiver from stem to stem. Hardly had this disappeared, when alowering mass of white foam was seen rapidly approaching the vessel.The noise from the advancing volume of water is described as deafening.The barque was struck flat aback; but, before there was time to touch abrace, the sails had filled again, and the roaring white sea had passedahead."

A strikingly similar event occurred only 2 years later on theopposite side of the world. Captain C.D. Swart of the Dutch barque J.P.A. reported in the American Journal of Meteorology 4 (1887) that, when sailing at 37 degrees 39 minutes N and 57degrees W, at about 5 pm on 19 March 1887,during a severe storm in which it was "as dark as night above," twobrilliant fireballs appeared as in a sea of fire. One bolide "fell intothe water very close alongside the vessel with a roar, and caused thesea to make tremendous breakers which swept over the vessel. Asuffocating atmosphere and perspiration ran down every person's face onboard and caused everyone to gasp for fresh air. Immediately afterthis, solid lumps of ice fell on deck, and everything on deck and inthe rigging became iced, notwithstanding that the thermometerregistered 19 degrees C."

On 20 August 1907, the steamship Cambrianarrived in Boston from England with an equally extraordinary tale totell. When the ship was several hundred miles south of Cape Race,Newfoundland, steaming along under a clear sky, a brilliant fireballappeared near the northeastern horizon and "rushed across the sky likea rocket. The next moment it passed over the topmast of the liner witha tremendous roar and plowed up the sea about fifty yards from theboat. The upheaval of the water was terrific, but the ship was notdamaged." The report of this event was carried in the New York Times.

Next, according to the Times, on 13 September 1930, a fireball plunged into the sea near Eureka, California, barely missing the tug Humboldt, which was towing the Norwegian motorship Childarout to sea. It requires little imagination to appreciate that such anevent, if it were to strike a ship, should easily cause fatalities, oreven the loss of the vessel with all hands. [Lewis, 1999]

Now, that just gives you a taste of what is to come. So, without further ado, here is:

THE LIST: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

10,000 - 11,000 B.C. - The earliest disaster weknow of from our historical or mythic records is, of course, thelegendary Deluge of Atlantis. The description of the end of Atlantisgiven by Plato in the "Timaeus" and "Critias" dialogues bears strikingresemblance to what many scientists are now agreed would be theinevitable result of an oceanic impact by a disintegrating comet orlarge asteroid. The resultant 'tsunami', or tidal waves, would easilyreach 2000 ft. high as they approached land, wiping out any and allcoastal settlements. The deluge traditions, of which there areliterally hundreds worldwide, appear in this light to be variations onPlato's account, and could even be actual observation-based tales,eye-witness accounts of the same, or similar, events. This is verylikely the event discussed by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture. As I have discussed in my book, The Secret History of the World,the North and South American continents in the Western Hemisphere fitall the descriptions of "Atlantis," and it is very likely that theevent that led to the extinction of about 30 species of large mammalsabout 12,000 years ago was the source of the legends of Atlantis andprobably the legends of a global deluge: Noah's Flood.

Back in the 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at theUniversity of New Mexico led an expedition to Alaska to look for humanremains. He didn't find human remains; he found miles and miles of icymuck just packed with mammoths, mastodons, and several kinds of bison,horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Alaska, themembers of the expedition watched in horror as bulldozers pushed thehalf-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animaltusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades "like shavings beforea giant plane". The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death,most of them "pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoriccatastrophic disturbance."[Hibben, Frank, The Lost Americans (New York:Thomas & Crowell Co. 1946)]

The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles inevery direction.[ibid.] There were trees and animals, layers of peatand moss, twisted and tangled and mangled together as though someCosmic mixmaster sucked them all in circa 12000 years ago, and thenfroze them instantly into a solid mass. [Sanderson, Ivan T., "Riddle ofthe Frozen Giants", Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960.]

Just north of Siberia entire islands are formed of the bones ofPleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into thefreezing Arctic Ocean. One estimate suggests that some ten millionanimals may be buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousandsupon thousands of tusks created a massive ivory trade for the mastercarvers of China, all from the frozen mammoths and mastodons ofSiberia. The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to thepreserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were foundin its mouth.

What kind of terrible event overtook these millions of creatures ina single day? Well, the evidence suggests an enormous tsunami ragingacross the land, tumbling animals and vegetation together, to befinally quick-frozen for the next 12000 years. But the extinction wasnot limited to the Arctic, even if the freezing at colder locationspreserved the evidence of Nature's rage.

Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of thePleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysteriousepisodes in zoological history, confessing, "no one knows the answer."He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem ofthe extinction of many other species in America at the same time.[Simpson, George G., Horses, New York: Oxford University Press) 1961]The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth,the saber-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were alltropical animals. These creatures didn't die because of the "gradualonset" of an ice age, "unless one is willing to postulate freezingtemperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs thequestion." [Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., "Bestiary forPleistocene Biologists", Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967]

Massive piles of mastodon and saber-toothed tiger bones werediscovered in Florida. [Valentine, quoted by Berlitz, Charles, TheMystery of Atlantis (New York, 1969)] Mastodons, toxodons, giant slothsand other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountainglaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giantjaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire specieswere all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of thePleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.

This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct at thesame time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska,the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the American camels. Itis obvious that the cause of these extinctions must be common to bothhemispheres, and that it was not gradual. A "uniformitarian glaciation"would not have caused extinctions because the various animals wouldhave simply migrated to better pasture. What is seen is a surprisingevent of uncontrolled violence. [Leonard, R. Cedric, Appendix A in "AGeological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge", Special Paper No. 1 (Bethany: Cowen Publishing 1979)] In other words, 12000 years ago,something terrible happened - so terrible that life on earth was nearlywiped out in a single day.

Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusksencased in the Siberian permafrost present an "insuperable difficulty"to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can resultin the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and wholeindividuals, "even if they died in winter." [Lippman, Harold E.,"Frozen Mammoths", Physical Geology, (New York 1969)] Especially whenmany of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in theirbelly. Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-DohertyGeological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form,states: "Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of theanimals and their full stomachs ... the animals were robust and healthywhen they died." [Farrand, William R., "Frozen Mammoths and ModernGeology", Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17, 1961] Unfortunately, inspite of this admission, this poor guy seems to have been incapable offacing the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millionsof bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of thePleistocene. Hibben sums up the situation in a single statement: "ThePleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of avague geological period, which fizzled to an uncertain end. This deathwas catastrophic and all inclusive." [Hibben, op. cit.] [Quoted from The Secret History of The World]

Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith write:

"Until recently, the astronomical mainstream was highly critical ofClube and Napier's giant comet hypothesis. However, the crash of cometShoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994 has led to a change in attitudes.The comet, watched by the world's observatories, was seen split into 20pieces and slammed into different parts of the planet over a period ofseveral days. A similar impact on Earth, it hardly needs saying, wouldhave been devastating."

The Carolina Bays date to this time. The Carolina bays aremysterious land features often filled with bay trees and other wetlandvegetation. Because of their oval shape and consistent orientation,they are considered by some authorities to be the result of a vastmeteor shower that occurred approximately 12,000 years ago. What ismost astonishing is the number of them. There are over 500,000 of theseshallow basins dotting the coastal plain from Georgia to Delaware. Thatis a frightening figure.

Unlike virtually any other bodies of water or changes in elevation,these topographical features follow a reliable and unmistakablepattern. Carolina Bays are circular, typically stretched, ellipticaldepressions in the ground, oriented along their long axis from theNorthwest to the Southeast. [T]hey are further characterized by anelevated rim of fine sand surrounding the perimeter. [...]

Robert Kobres, an independent researcher in Athens, Georgia, hasstudied Carolina Bays for nearly 20 years in conjunction with hislarger interest in impact threats from space. His recent,self-published, investigations have profound consequences for CarolinaBay study and demand research by academia as serious, relevant andpreviously unexamined new information. The essence of Kobres' theory isthat the search for "debris," and the comparison of Bays with"traditional" impact craters, falsely and naively assumes that circularcraters with extraterrestrial material in them are the only terrestrialevidence of past encounters with objects entering earth's atmosphere.

Kobres goes a logical step further by assuming that forcesassociated with incoming bodies, principally intense heat, should alsoleave visible signatures on the earth. And, finally, that physics doesnot demand that a "collision" of the bodies need necessarily occur toproduce enormous change on earth. To verify that such encounters arepossible outside of the physics lab, we need look no further than theso-called "Tunguska event."

At the epicenter of the explosion lay not a large crater with a"rock" in it, as might be expected, but nothing more than a number of"neat oval bogs." The Tunguska literature generally mentions the bogsonly in passing, since the researchers examining the site failed tolocate any evidence of a meteorite and went on to examine other aspectsof the explosion.

Now, how many human deaths ought we to assign to this event? AsFirestone, et al discuss, it was global in effect and the evidence of asharply reduced population of not only animals, but humans, is there inthe geological record. But what was the total human population? Whatkind of numbers can we plug into Lewis' calculations? Frankly, we don'tknow. Undoubtedly, millions of human beings perished at that time alongwith the extinction of many animal species. One thing that seemscertain is that if these numbers were included in Lewis' assessment, itwould make a significant change in the "average number of deaths byextraterrestrial bodies" per year. Though, of course, this was a verybig event, and those don't happen every year, or even every century.They happen on a scale of thousands of years and there hasn't been onelike that for 12000 years.

3195 B.C. - Eco-disaster as shown in tree rings.

The postulated bombardments and dust-veils at around 3195 BC,another narrowest tree-ring date, would have wreaked havoc on both thelocal and global climate, and any and all cultures affected would havetaken many decades, maybe even centuries, to recover. The sheer terrorthat 'multiple-Tunguska-class fireballs' would have instilled into thepeoples of those times would have understandably motivated them towardsbuilding some form of observatories to help predict future meteorshowers/storms as a matter of perceived urgency.

Again, we have no numbers of human fatalities to plug into the calculations.

2345 B.C. - Eco-disaster focused in the Levant as shown in tree-rings.

The French archaeologist, Marie-Agnes Courty, presented a paper atthe Society for Inter-Disciplinary Studies' July 1997 conference atCambridge University, in which she first detailed the findings ofexcavations at a site in northern Syria, at Tell Leilan. This was thefirst time ever that an archaeological excavation had been initiatedwhere the main purpose was to examine the stratigraphical record of thearea with a view to searching for evidence of 'scorched earth' due to asuspected episode of extra-terrestrial 'fireball bombardment'.

She and her team found much evidence of microscopic glass spherulestypical of melted sand and rock which is caused by the intense heatresulting from an asteroid impact or air-burst. She recommended furtherexcavations there and at other sites. It would make sense thatattention should be focussed on sites once occupied at dates where thetree-ring chronologies show evidence of abrupt climate changes - as atTell Leilan in northern Syria, where the 'burn event' has now beendated by Courty as immediately prior to 2345 BC, a 'narrowesttree-ring' date.

Another with no human fatality numbers included in the calculations.

Scientists have found the first evidence that a devastating meteorimpact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapseof civilisations more than 4,000 years ago.

Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed atwo-mile- wide circular depression which scientists say bears all thehallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to theMiddle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent tohundreds of nuclear bombs. Today's crater lies on what would have beenshallow sea 4,000 years ago, and any impact would have causeddevastating fires and flooding. The catastrophic effect of these couldexplain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into suddendecline around 2300 BC. - The crater's faint outline was found by DrSharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand,Johannesburg, on satellite images of the Al 'Amarah region, about 10miles north-west of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates and homeof the Marsh Arabs. (Robert Matthews Science Correspondent, TheTelegraph - London 11-4-1)

1628 B.C. - "The Exodus" - Biblicalscholars have been debating the date of the so-called Exodus forhundreds of years. The most recent researches have indicated that therewas no exodus as depicted in the Bible, it was all made up bypost-exilic priests - to create a "history" justifying their elitestatus and privileges. More than that, based on historical knowledge ofhow things were done in those times, they probably were not evenrelated to any of the people "carried away to Babylon" in the firstplace. And so, it seems logical to speculate that the backgroundinformation contained in the Exodus story - and other related storiesin the Bible, such as the collapse of Jericho and the destruction ofSodom and Gomorrah - were legendary stories of events that occurredaround the time of the eruption of Thera which has been fairly securelyfixed around 1600 B.C. plus or minus 50 years. Mike Baillie reportsthat whatever happened at this period of history that includes thismonstrous eruption, it was global in effect as is shown in thetree-ring chronologies. In other words, more was going on than just avolcanic eruption. Again, no numbers of fatalities to plug into thecalculations though there are many ancient reports of plague and massdeath and Egyptian records report many strange sky, weather, and plaguephenomena.

1159 B.C. - Collapse of Shang and Mycenean cultures. Collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean region. Wikipedia tells us:

The Bronze Age collapse is the name given by those historians whosee the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, asviolent, sudden and culturally disruptive, expressed by the collapse ofpalace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia, replaced after a hiatus bythe isolated village cultures of the Dark Age period of history of theAncient Middle East.

Mike Baillie points out that a series of impacts/overheadexplosions, would more adequately explain the longstanding problem ofthe end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 12thcentury BC. At that time, many - uncountable - major sites weredestroyed and totally burned and it has all been blamed on thosesupernatural "Sea Peoples." If that was the case, if it was invasionand conquest, there ought to at least be some evidence for that, likedead warriors or signs of warfare... but for the most part, that is notthe case. There were almost no bodies found, and no precious objectsexcept those that were hidden away as though someone expected to returnfor them, or didn't have time to retrieve them. The people who fled(extra-terrestrial events often have precursor activities and warningsbecause a comet can often be observed approaching for some time) wereprobably also killed in the act of fleeing and the result was totalabandonment and total destruction of the cities in question.

A comet or asteroid smashed into modern-day Germany some 2,200 yearsago, unleashing energy equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs,scientists reported on Friday.

The 1.1-kilometre (0.7-mile) diameter rock wacked into southeasternBavaria, leaving an "exceptional field" of meteorites and impactcraters that stretch from the town of Altoetting to an area around LakeChiemsee, the scientists said in an article in the latest issue of USmagazine Astronomy.

Colliding with the Earth's atmosphere at more than 43,000 kms perhour, the space rock probably broke up at an altitude of 70 kms), theybelieve.

The biggest chunk smashed into the ground with a force equivalent to 106 million tonnes of TNT, or 8,500 Hiroshima bombs.

"The forest beneath the blast would have ignited suddenly, burninguntil the impact's blast wave shut down the conflagration," theinvestigators said.

"Dust may have been blown into the stratosphere, where it would havebeen transported around the globe easily... The region must have beendevastated for decades."

The biggest crater is now a circular lake called Tuettensee,measuring 370 metres (1,200 feet) across. Scores of smaller craters andother meteorite impacts can be spotted in an elliptical field,inflicted by other debris.

The study was carried out by the Chiemgau Impact Research Team,whose five members included a mineralogist, a geologist and anastronomer. [...]

Additional evidence comes from local discoveries of Celtic artefacts, which appear to have been scorched on one side.

That helped to establish an approximate date for the impact of between 480 and 30 BC.

The figure may be fine-tuned to around 200 BC, thanks to tree-ringevidence from preserved Irish oaks, which show a slowing in growtharound 207 BC.

This may have been caused by a veil of dust kicked up the impact, which filtered out sunlight.

In addition, Roman authors at about the same time wrote aboutshowers of stones falling from the skies and terrifying the populace.

The object is more likely to have been a comet than an asteroid,given the length of the ellipse and scattered debris, the report says.

44 B.C. - Pliny states that there were"Portentous and protracted eclipses of the sun occur, such as the oneafter the murder of Caesar the dictator...." Yet there were no solareclipses visible from anywhere in the Roman Empire from Feb. of 48 B.C.through Dec. of 41 B.C., inclusive. There was a spectacular daylightcomet in 44 B.C., perhaps the most famous comet in antiquity. A dustveil occluded the sky over Italy in the spring of 44, and has oftenbeen attributed to an (unconfirmed) eruption of Mt Etna. There aresulfate deposits in the Greenland ice cores for this year and there istree ring evidence from North America, where dendrochronology points toa climatic change in the late 40's B.C. What hit and where it hit, hasyet to be determined, and whether or not there was death anddestruction somewhere on the globe, is unknown.

John S. Lewis does not include this event in his calculations.

60 - 70 AD - The destruction of Jerusalem.

The story Josephus tells of the sixties is one of famine, socialunrest, institutional deterioration, bitter internal conflicts, classwarfare, banditry, insurrections, intrigues, betrayals, bloodshed, andthe scattering of Judeans throughout Palestine. ... There were wars,rumors of wars for the better part of ten years and Josephus reports portents, including a brilliant daylight in the middle of the night! (Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, 1988, 2006)

We recognize that brilliant daylight at night from the Tunguska event.

Josephus gives several portents of the evil to befall Jerusalem andthe temple. He described a star resembling a sword, a comet, a lightshining in the temple, a cow giving birth to a lamb at the moment itwas to be sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple, armies fighting in the sky,and a voice from the Holy of Holies declaring, "We are departing"(Josephus, Jewish Wars, 6). (Obviously, the voice was apocryphal.)

Some of these portents are mentioned by other contemporaryhistorians, Tacitus for example. However, Tacitus, in book five of hisHistories, castigated the superstitious Jews for not recognizing andoffering expiations for the portents to avert the disasters. He put thedestruction of Jerusalem down to the stupidity or willful ignorance ofthe Jews themselves in not offering the appropriate sacrifices.

Thus there was a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city[Jerusalem], and a comet, that continued a whole year... (Josephus,Jewish Wars 6.3)

In short, it very well may be that the eschatological writings inthe New Testament, the very formation of the Myth of Jesus, was basedon cometary events of the time, including a memory of the "Star in theEast." The destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem may very well havebeen an "act of God," as reported by Mark in his Gospel.

312 - Italy - A team of geologistsbelieves it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, anddating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision saidto have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity. The small,circular Cratere del Sirente in central Italy is clearly an impactcrater, said the geologists because its shape fits and it is alsosurrounded by numerous smaller, secondary craters, gouged out byejected debris, as expected from impact models.

Radiocarbon dating puts the crater's formation at about the righttime to have been witnessed by Constantine and there are magneticanomalies detected around the secondary craters - possibly due tomagnetic fragments from the meteorite. It would have struck the Earthwith the force of a small nuclear bomb, perhaps a kiloton in yield. Itwould have looked like a nuclear blast, with a mushroom cloud andshockwaves.

...those caught in the earth beneath the buildings were incineratedand sparks of fire appeared out of the air and burned everyone theystruck like lightning. The surface of the earth boiled and foundationsof buildings were struck by thunderbolts thrown up by the earthquakesand were burned to ashes by fire... it was a tremendous and incrediblemarvel with fire belching out rain, rain falling from tremendousfurnaces, flames dissolving into showers ... as a result Antioch becamedesolate ... in this terror up to 250,000 people perished. (JohnMalalas quoted by Jeffreys, E., Jeffreys, M. and Scott, R. 1986, TheChronicle of John Malalas, Byzantina Australiensia, Australian Assoc.Byzantine Studies 4, Melbourne.)

The Praetorian Prefect Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator wrote a letter documenting the conditions.

All of us are observing, as it were, a blue coloured sun; we marvelat bodies which cast no mid-day shadow, and at that strength ofintensest heat reaching extreme and dull tepidity ... So we have had awinter without storms, spring without mildness, summer without heat ...The seasons have changed by failing to change; and what used to beachieved by mingled rains cannot be gained from dryness only.

Procopius of Caesarea, a Byzantine, wrote:

And it came about during this year that a most dread portent tookplace. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like themoon, during the whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun ineclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it isaccustomed to shed.

John of Ephesus, cleric and a historian, wrote:

The sun was dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months; eachday it shone for about four hours; and still this light was only afeeble shadow ... the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted likesour grapes.

In the wake of this inexplicable darkness, crops failed and faminestruck. And then, pestilence. But here we mean "pestilence" as Jacmed'Agramaont, a doctor writing in 1348 described it in reference to the"Black Death".

He discussed it in terms of an "epidemic or pestilence andmortalities of people" which threatened Lerida from "some parts andregions neighbouring to us" ... Agramont said nothing concerning theterm epidemia, but he extensively developed what he meant by pestilencia.He gave this latter term a very peculiar etymology, in accordance witha from of knowledge established by Isidore of Seville (570=636) in hisEtymologiae, which came to be widely accepted throughout Europe duringthe Middle Ages. He split the term pestilencia up into three syllables,each having a particular meaning: pes = tempesta: 'storm, tempest'; te= 'temps, time', lencia = clardat: 'brightness, light'; hence, heconcluded, the pestilencia was 'the time of tempest caused by lightfrom the stars.' [Jon Arrizabalaga, see Part One]

During the time of Justinian, this "pestilence" ravaged Europe,reducing the population of the Roman empire by a third, killingfour-fifths of the citizens of Constantinople, reaching as far East asChina and as far Northwest as Great Britain. John of Ephesus documentedthe progress of this "pestilence" in AD 541-542 in Constantinople, where city officials gave up trying to count the dead after two hundred thirty thousand:

The city stank with corpses as there were neither litters nordiggers, and corpses were heaped up in the streets ... It might happenthat [a person] went out to market to buy necessities and while he wasstanding and talking or counting his change, suddenly the end wouldovercome the buyer here and the seller there, the merchandise remainingin the middle with the payment for it, without there being either buyeror seller to pick it up.

Although scholars place the historical King Arthur in the fifthcentury, the date of his death is given as AD 539. According toBaillie, the imagery from the Arthurian legend is in accordance withthe appearance of a comet and subsequent famine and plague: the "WasteLand" of legend. Ireland's St. Patrick stories feature a wasteland aswell. And although St. Patrick is credited with ridding Ireland ofsnakes, we might consider that there never were snakes in Ireland, andthat snakes and dragons are images associated with comets.

Until this point in time, the Britons had held control of post-RomanBritain, keeping the Anglo-Saxons isolated and suppressed. After theRomans were gone, the Britons maintained the status quo, living intowns, with elected officials, and carrying on trade with the empire.After AD 536, the year reported as the "death of Arthur", the Britons,the ancient Cymric empire that at one time had stretched from Cornwallin the south to Strathclyde in the north, all but disappeared, and werereplaced by Anglo-Saxons. There is much debate among scholars as towhether the Anglo-Saxons killed all of the Britons, or assimilatedthem. Here we must consider that they were victims of possibly manyoverhead cometary explosions which wiped out most of the population ofEurope, plunging it into the Dark Ages which were, apparently, reallyDARK, atmospherically speaking.

The mystery of the origins of the red dragon symbol, now on the flagof Wales, has perplexed many historians, writers and romanticists, andthe archæological community generally has refrained from commenting onthis most unusual emblem, claiming it does not concern them. In theancient Welsh language it is known as 'Draig Goch' - 'red dragon', andin "Y Geiriadur Cymraeg Prifysgol Cymru", the "University of WalesWelsh Dictionary", (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1967, p. 1082)there are translations for the various uses of the Welsh word 'draig'.Amongst them are common uses of the word, which is today taken just tomean a 'dragon', but in times past it has also been used to refer to'Mellt Distaw' - (sheet lightning), and also 'Mellt Didaranau' -(lightning unaccompanied by thunder).

But the most interesting common usage of the word in earlier times,according to this authoritative dictionary, is 'Maen Mellt' the wordused to refer to a 'meteorite'. And this makes sense, as the Welsh word'maen' translates as 'stone', while the Welsh word 'mellt' translatesas 'lightning' - so literally a 'lightning-stone'. That the ancientlanguage of the Welsh druids has words still in use today which have inthe past been used to describe both a dragon and also a meteorite, issomething that greatly helps us to follow the destructive 'trail of thedragon' as it was described in early Welsh 'riddle-poems'. [...]

The exact nature and sequence of events in the mid-6th. century A.D.that gave rise to the period we refer to as the European 'Dark Age' isstill a matter for speculation amongst historians and archæologists.Over the past 20 years or so, certain paleo-climatologists have beguncomparing notes with archæologists and astronomers, and interestingly,in the absence of written records, many have begun to look a littlemore closely at mythology in their efforts to corroborate the findingsof their researches. While much of this recent bout ofinter-disciplinary brainstorming has focussed on the 6th.C. AD start ofthe European Dark Age, earlier dates are also of great interest tothose embroiled in this veritable 'paradigm shift'.[...]

In recent years certain astronomers have increasingly come toappreciate that encoded in the folklore and mythologies of manycultures are the accurate observations of ancient skywatchers. Almostall tell of times when death and mass destruction came from the skies,events that are often portrayed as 'celestial battles' between whatthey variously depicted as 'the Gods'. And curiously the imagery inthese 'myths' have many common features, even between the mythologiesof cultures widely spaced in time and location.[The European 'Dark Age' And Welsh Oral Tradition]

Out on the Asian steppes, whatever happened in AD 536 causedpolitical upheaval. The horse-based economy of the warlike Avarsfoundered, and their vassals, the cattle-herding Turks, overthrew them.Drivenfrom the steppes, the Avars joined forces with the Slavs inHungary on the borders of the Roman empire.

Gildas, who was writing at approximately 540 AD, says that theisland of Britain was on fire from sea to sea " ... until it had burnedalmost the whole surface of the island and was licking the westernocean with its fierce red tongue."[5] . While in "The Life of St.Teilo" contained in the Llandaf Charters, of St. Teilo, who hadrecently been made Bishop of Llandaf Cathedral in Morganwg, SouthWales, it says:

" ... however he could not long remain, on account of the pestilencewhich nearly destroyed the whole nation. It was called the YellowPestilence, because it occasioned all persons who were seized by it tobe yellow and without blood, and it appeared to men a column of awatery cloud, having one end trailing along the ground, and the otherabove, proceeding in the air, and passing through the whole countrylike a shower going through the bottom of valleys. Whatever livingcreatures it touched with its pestiferous blast, either immediatelydied, or sickened for death ... and so greatly did the aforesaiddestruction rage throughout the nation, that it caused the country tobe nearly deserted".

St. Teilo is recorded as having left South Wales for Brittany toescape the Yellow Pestilence, and that it lasted for some 11 years.

In 540, in Yemen, the Great Dam of Marib, datingfrom around the seventh century B.C., one of the engineering wonders ofthe ancient world and a central part of the south Arabian civilization,broke and began to collapse. By 550 AD, the dam was acomplete loss and thousands of people migrated to another oasis on theArabian peninsula, Medina. The Arab tribes, traumatized by theenvironmental disasters around them, began to think of conquest for thesake of survival. In 610 AD, a new leader unified them: Muhammad.

Although a great many historical changes happened in the seventhcentury, such as the Roman war with Persia, the rise of Islam,rebellion and civil war in the Roman empire, and the advance of theSlavs driven by the Avars, it can be said that the seeds of thesechanges, the destruction of the old that made way for the new, can betraced to the environmental catastrophe of 536 AD.

John Lewis does not include any estimates of the death anddestruction occurring at that time in his "average number of annualdeaths by comets."

1178 - 18 June on the Julian calendar,25 June, Gregorian - In this year, on the Sunday before the Feast ofSt. John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon had first becomevisible a marvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more menwho were sitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright newmoon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tileted toward theeast; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint ofthe divisin a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerabledistance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moonwhich was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in thewords of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes,the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed itsproper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, theflame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning tonormal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn,that is along its whole lengthe, took on a blackish appearance. Thepresent writer was given this report by men who saw it with their owneyes, and are prepared to stake ther honour on an oath that they havemade no addition or falsification in the above narrative. (Gervase ofCanterbury)

1347 - 1348 - Black Death kills abouthalf the population of Western Europe. The effects of this event were,apparently, somewhat global though the number of deaths worldwide isunknown. John S. Lewis does not include the millions of fatalities ofthe Black Death in his calculations.

1348 - 25 Jan. - Earthquake inCArinthia, 16 cities destroyed, fire fell from heaven; over 40,000dead. John Lewis does not include this event in his calculations.

1516 - May - Nantan, China - "Duringsummertime in May of Jiajing 11th year, stars fell from the northwestdirection, five to six fold long, waving like snakes and dragons. Theywere as bright as lightning and disappeared in seconds". Many of themwere recovered by local farmers in 1958 when China needed steel for the"Great Leap Forward" advocated by Mao Zedong. They have coarseoctahedral structure and contain 92.35% iron & 6.96% nickel,belonging to IIICD classification of Wasson et al (1980)'s. Most Nantanmeteorites weight 150 to 1500 kg. Due to the humid condition, smallerpieces buried in soils of lower valleys have been extensively weatheredand oxidized into limonite.

1930 - 13 Aug. - Brazil - The "RioCuraca event." Brazlilian "Tunguska event"; fire and "depopulation" -"An ear-piercing "whistling" sound, which might be understood as beinga manifestation of the electrophonic phenomena which have beendiscussed in WGN over the past few years; the sun appearing to be"blood-red" before the explosion. The event occurred at about 8h localtime, so that the bolide probably came from the sunward side of theearth. If the object were spawning dust and meteoroids-- that is, itwas cometary in nature--then, since low-inclination, eccentric orbitsproduce radiants close to the sun, it might be that the solarcoloration (which, in this explanation, would have been witnessedelsewhere) was due to such dust in the line of sight to the sun. Inshort, the earth was within the tail of the small comet. There was afall of fine ash prior to the explosion, which covered the surroundingvegetation with a blanket of white.

1935 - 11 Dec. - 21h local time -British Guyana - Lat: 2 deg 10min North, Long: 59 deg 10 min West,close to Marudi Mountain. A report from Serge A. Korff of the BartolResearch Foundation, Franklin Institute (Delaware, USA) suggested thatthe region of devastation might be greater than that involved in theTunguska event itself. Eye-witness accounts were n accord with a largemeteoroid/small asteroid entry, with a body passing overheadaccompanied by a terrific roar (presumably electrophonic effects),later concussions, and the sky being lit up like daylight. A localaircraft operator, Art Williams, reported seeing an area of forest morethan twenty miles (32 kilometers) in extent which had been destroyed,and he later stated that the shattered jungle was elongated rather thancircular, as occurred at Tunguska and would be expected from the airblast caused by an object entering away from the vertical (the mostlikely entry angle for all cosmic projectiles is 45 degrees).

1940s - Qatar - A crater, believed tohave been created by the impact of a falling meteor, found near Dukhan.Sheikh Salman bin Jabor al-Thani, head of the astronomical departmentat Qatar Scientific Club, said yesterday the club believed that themeteor had hit Qatar in the 1940s. The club started a search forevidence three years ago because of stories of a "falling star" told bypeople of that era. The club took the help of Google Earth in thesearch. They succeeded in locating five craters, which were justvisible on the surface.

1947 - 12 Feb. -Sikhote Alin,Vladivostok - An iron meteorite that broke up only about 5 miles abovethe earth rained iron. It produced over 100 craters with the largestbeing around 85 feet in diameter. The strewnfield covered an area ofabout 1 mile by a half mile. There were no fires or similar destructionlike that found at Tunguska. Shredded trees and broken branches mostly.A total of 23 tons of meteorites were recovered and it's been estimatedit's total mass was around 70 tons when it broke up.

2000 - January - Canada - a 150-tonnemeteoroid lit the skies over Whitehorse, and exploded over a lake about100 kilometres south of the city. The Tagish Lake meteor produced atreasure of information about a rare kind of meteorite.

2000 - January - Iberian peninsula -ice chunks weighing up to 6.6 pounds rained on Spain for 10 dayscausing extensive damage to cars and an industrial storage facility. Atfirst, scientists thought the phenomenon was unique to Spain. Duringthe past three years, however, they've accumulated strong evidence thatmegacryometeors are falling all around the globe. More than 50 fallshave been confirmed, and researchers believe that's a small fraction ofthe actual number, since others may hit unoccupied areas or melt beforediscovery. Most megacrymeteor falls occur in January, February andMarch. Megacryometeors show the telltale onionskin layering seen inhailstones. They also contain dust particles and air pockets found inhail. But they are formed in cloudless skies, a notion that defiesresearch on hail formation.

2001 - 25 July to 23 Sept. - Kerala,India - red rain sporadically fell; staining clothes with an appearancesimilar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was alsoreported. The rains were the result of the atmospheric disintegrationof a comet, according to a study conducted at the School of Pure andApplied Physics of the MG University by Dr Godfrey Louis and hisstudent Santosh Kumar. The red rain cells were devoid of DNA whichsuggests their extra-terrestrial origin. The findings published in theinternational journal 'Astrophysics and Space Science' state that thecometery fragment contained dense collection of red cells.

2002 - 6 June - asteroid/cometexplosion over the Mediterranean. Estimated at five to 10 meters indiameter, it released a burst of energy comparable to the nuclear bombdropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

2002 - 24 Sept. - near Bodaibo,Irkutsk, Siberia - 1:50 amEye-witness accounts of the event reported alarge luminous object falling to Earth near Bodiabo in Siberia. Huntersin the region have also reported the existence of a crater surroundedby burnt forest suggesting that an impact event had occurred. The eventwas detected by near-by geophones as a moderate-earthquake.

2004 - 3 Sept. - a small asteroidexploded in the stratosphere above Antarctica depositing sufficientmicron-sized dust particles to cause 'local cooling, and muchspeculation as to the possible effects on the ozone layer.

2006 - 1 Feb. - Canada - In Calgary onFebruary 1st, 20 people reported seeing a fireball, an exceptionallybright meteor, streak across the sky just before 7 a.m., lasting forseveral seconds before breaking up into fragments. It was estimatedthat remnants of the meteorite landed about 400 km south of Calgarysomewhere in Montana about two minutes after it appeared as a ball offire.

2006 - 1 Feb. - Bangladesh - A'meteor' from outer space fell with a big bang on a field in Singparavillage of sadar upazila yesterday afternoon creating panic andcuriosity among people. No one was reported hurt. On informationSuperintendent of Police Khandker Golam Farooq rushed to the spot andasked his companions and villagers to dig the earth near the house ofone Fazlur Rahman from where smoke was still emitting. To theiramazement they found a lead-like black material three feet below theearth. Hot and weighing 2.5kg, the triangular material looked like amortar shell, witnesses said. The meteor was kept in custody of theThakurgaon Police Station.

2006 - 17, 20 Feb. - Scotland - Thehunt is on for the crash sites of two meteors near Stirling Castle.Scientists have been spurred into action by reports of spectacular"balls of fire" falling in the area. If discovered, they would be thefirst meteorites confirmed to have hit north of the Border for almost100 years. The incidents, reported by several witnesses, were on theevenings of Friday, February 17 and the following Monday, February 20."Although meteorite falls are rare everywhere, Scotland seems to haveescaped remarkably lightly. There have only been four meteoritesrecovered from Scotland, compared with more than 18 from England andWales. Statistically, we are overdue another one."

2006 - 12 April - Australia - A Perthastronomer says a spectacular light show in the sky 12/3 was a meteor.Sightings were made as far south as Albany and inland through the WheatBelt. It lit up the countryside for hundreds of kilometres around thesouth-west of Western Australia." Witnesses say the the sky lit upabout 9:00pm AEDT, and the light was followed by a thundering soundthat shook buildings.

2006 - 4 May - TEXAS - Astronomerssaid a large meteor shower crossed straight over El Paso just before9:45 p.m. Thursday the 4th of May. One meteor was so large that it castan orange glow against the mountain. "The animals were going wild, thehorses were bucking and dogs were barking and howling and then, all ofa sudden right above my house, there was a big bright light and thenjust 'Bang!' And it lit up the five acres that are around us, and thenI covered my eyes like this because it was bright and when it got pastI saw there was a tail and it just went 'Shhhh' toward the HuecoMountains."

2006 - 2 June - Minnesota, Wisconsin,North Dakota and Canada - a fireball was spotted estimated to be some20 miles above the Earth's surface. A sonic boom was heard in the Lakeof the Woods area of Minnesota, so there may be some pieces of themeteor that survived the fall.

2006 - 7 June - Norway - A largemeteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impactan astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. Themeteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, June7th, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer skyabove the Arctic Circle. 'I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky,and this became a light with a tail of smoke. I heard the bang sevenminutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge ofdynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away.' The meteor struck amountainside in Reisadalen. The country's leading astronomer said heexpects the meteor to prove to be the largest to hit Norway in moderntimes, even bigger than the 198-pound Alta meteorite of 1904. 'If themeteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it tothe Hiroshima bomb. Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but inexplosive force we may be able to compare it to the bomb.'

2006 - 25 June - Pennsylvania -Residents of the Tuscarawas Valley who heard a deafening boom about12:40 a.m. Monday the 19th and stepped outside likely saw what oneperson described as "a marvelous fireball with red streaks in the sky."It probably was a meteor falling through the atmosphere. Numerouscallers reported a large red fireball. Several said their homes shook.New Philadelphia police said they received reports from several callerswho witnessed the fireball or heard the boom. One woman described it as"a blue light that lit up the sky and went down." Police in Dover saidmultiple callers reported they heard a loud bang and something rattledtheir windows. Air Traffic Command in Washington, D.C. confirmed thatCleveland's control center was checking into a meteor shower thatoccurred within its air space.

2006 - 10 July - South Africa - An iceball that landed in Douglasdale, South Africa, might be one of thefirst 'megacryometeors' recorded in Africa. The ice ball, which landedon the pavement in suburban Douglasdale last week, was about the sizeof a microwave oven. The impact of the ice ball's fall created a smallcrater on the pavement, which was covered with pieces of broken ice.Despite sharing many chemical characteristics with hail, ice balls areformed under clear-sky conditions. Ice balls have been recorded sincethe 19th century. They have the potential to damage people, buildingsand cars, but no injuries were reported as a result of this one.

2006 - 14 July - Norway - At 10:20am abus driver from Ås, south of Oslo, was sitting in the outhouse at hisholiday cabin near Rygge on the 14th of July when he heard an enormousblast. Right after that, some particles from a meteor that explodedover the Oslo area rained down just outside. He said he didn't thinktoo much about the surprising blast at first, dismissing it as probablycoming from an exercise at a nearby military air station at Rygge. Buthe said the blast and the rumbling it caused was terrible. He was justhooking the door when he heard a new noise, a whistling sort of sound,followed by a new bang on some aluminum plates lying near the outhouse.Sure enough, it was particles from a meteor that exploded somewhereover the Oslo Fjord area on Friday morning. Astronomers confirmMartinsen's remarkable discovery of meteorite particles on hisproperty. "This is Norway's 14th meteorite, but we've never heard abouta meteorite landing so close to a person before." -- A family fromMoss, south of Oslo, came home from their summer holidays to find ameteorite in their garden. It's another remnant of the meteor thatexploded over the Oslo Fjord area on the 14th of JUly. Astronomers inNorway are calling the discovery of meteorites around southeast Norway"incredible," and urge local residents to keep looking for more. "Twobranches on our plum tree were broken. I lifted them up and there laythis stone." It had made a hole measuring about seven centimeters inhis lawn.

2006 - 12 Sept. - New Zealand - Asmall piece of rock that has been found in a paddock in New Zealand maybe a piece of the meteorite that streaked across the sky there Tuesdaythe 12th, panicking residents who flooded emergency hotlines. A farmerfound a 10cm by 5cm piece of "almost weightless" rock in his fieldtoday near the town of Dunsandel, south of Christchurch. It has beensent to New Zealand's National Radiation Laboratory for analysis. Themeteorite tore across the sky over the northern half of the SouthIsland in the afternoon, leaving a bright, burning trial behind it andcausing a sonic boom that rattled houses and shook the ground. It thenapparently erupted into a fireball, sending forth a thick puff ofsmoke. People were sent running from the homes and offices when theyheard the boom, fearing buildings could collapse. The sonic boom wasregistered on earthquake-detecting equipment. The boom meant themeteorite was probably travelling "very low". It was probably about thesize of a basketball as it shredded through the sky and became a"terminal fireball" at a speed of about 40,000kph. "If this hadhappened at night, it would have lit up the whole countryside."

2006 - 10 Oct. - A fire that destroyeda cottage near Bonn and injured a 77-year-old man was probably causedby a meteor and witnesses saw an arc of blazing light in the sky,German police said on Friday. Burkhard Rick, a spokesman for the policein Siegburg east of Bonn, said the fire gutted the cottage and badlyburnt the man's hands and face in the incident on October 10.

2007 - January - Tampa, Florida - a200-pound chunk of ice streaked through the clear Florida sky andlanded in the back seat of a really nice red Ford Mustang. The car wastotaled.

2007 - 4 Jan - Authorities were tryingto identify a mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roofof a house in eastern New Jersey.

Nobody was injured when the golf-ball sized object, weighingnearly as much as a can of soup, struck the home and embedded itself ina wall Tuesday night. ... Approximately 20 to 50 rock-like objects fallevery day over the entire planet, said Carlton Pryor, a professor ofastronomy at Rutgers University. "It's not all that uncommon to haverocks rain down from heaven," said Pryor, who had not seen the objectthat struck the Monmouth County home. "These are usually rocky or amixture of rock and metal."

2007 - 10 January - Russia - ameteorite fell in January in the Altai Territory in southern Siberiaand searchers found an extraterrestrial substance which could bemeteorite fragments. "We have collected about 50 samples, and vitreousthreads (traces of comet substance) were discovered in the first ofthem using a microscope." Local motorists and residents witnessed theimpact of a fiery ball, which eventually ended in a loud soundresembling an explosion.

2007 - 24 Jan. - Virginian, U.S. -Giles County residents were a little shaken after a tremor-like event,others say they heard a loud "thunder-like" sound. Virginia Techresearchers say they received several calls about a meteor sighting thesame time of the tremors. The bizarre incident took place around 8pm.Researchers say the seismic station in Giles County did get a veryshort but intense seismic signal.

2007 - 31 Jan. - Turkey - Police wereinundated with calls from scores of people from Didim to Bodrum afterthey heard a big bang and a flash of light across the skies. Theflashing green, yellow and red lights were from a meteorite whichcrashed through the earth's atmosphere and landed in Yesilkent. Astartled man revealed that the rock had smashed a hole in the ground atthe Green Park Complex, at Yesilkent, narrowly missing him by tenmetres. Police reported that people from Bodrum, Milas and Didim hadheard a bang and seen the flashing light across the skies at about5:30pm.

2007 - 4 Feb. - Midwestern U.S. -Scores of people all over the Midwest and Upper Midwestern UnitedStates reported seeing flames and fiery explosions in the sky Sundaynight. From southeastern Wisconsin to as far as Des Moines, Iowa andSt. Louis, people reported seeing balls of fire, possibly meteors,streaking across the sky on Sunday night. "We had a pilot reportingseeing a meteor". Reports came from residents in central Missouri,Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

2007 - 15 Feb. - Ohio - Somethinghappened at around 9 p.m. that a lot of people heard. But nobody seemsto have any idea what it was. "It" was a loud bang, something loudenough to be heard all over the county, and loud enough to make smallobjects move in houses. Rumors range from an earthquake to a meteorstrike, a sonic boom to something ice-related. While we may never knowfor sure, at least one scientist believes the meteor could be theanswer. There's no evidence to suggest an earthquake could have causedthe bang, especially not over the range specified. One man said he sawa meteor with a relatively long trail, with red, green and goldcoloration. It was headed east to west and lasted about three seconds;after it faded, the sonic boom washed over him. "I saw it first. It wasthe most eerie, cool, scary, wonderful thing. You just see this dragontail going across the sky. All of a sudden, everything goes boom."

2007 - 22 Feb. - Rajasthan, India -Three people were killed and four injured in a mysterious blast in avillage in India's northern Rajasthan state Thursday that villagersclaim was caused by a meteorite, news reports said. Residents ofBanchola village in Bundi district, about 200 kilometres south ofRajasthan capital Jaipur, said the victims were sitting with some ironscrap in an open field when an "object" fell from the sky and hit them,IANS news agency reported.

2007 - 23 Feb. - Panama - Panamaniangeologists found a meteorite at Rio Hato, a coastal town west of thecapital Panama City. The meteorite fell onto Rio Hato's beach onFriday. The landing was witnessed by a security guard, who described itas a ball of fire crashing down from the sky onto the sand. The 4.2 kgred object, measuring 20 cm in diameter, was to be X-rayed for moredetails. The meteorite shows burn marks on its exterior, and appears tobe mainly carbon-based, in contrast to most meteorites, which mainlycontain iron.

2007 - 29 Mar - Flaming debris of apossible meteor almost hit a plane - The pilots of a Chilean passengerjet reported seeing flaming debris fall past their aircraft as itapproached the airport at Auckland, New Zealand. The captain "madevisual contact with incandescent fragments several kilometres away".The pilots reported the near-miss to air traffic controllers,reportedly saying the noise of the debris breaking the sound barriercould be heard above the roar of his aircraft's engines.

2007 - 10 May - Spain - Fireballspotted across central Spain. Scientists think some fragments may havefallen to earth in the Ciudad Real area. A fireball fell across thecentre of the country on Thursday night with sightings in Cuenca,Toledo, Ciudad Real and Valladolid. Scientists believe it was ameteorite and say it's quite a normal phenomenon, possibly a fragmentfrom a comet which fell from earth orbit.

2007 - 14 May - Hubbardton, Vermont -Recorded as a 2.1 temblor on the Richter scale, a quake hit at 4:10a.m. One Hubbardton resident who said he was wide awake at 4 a.m. saidhe not only felt the earthquake, he saw what caused it. He said he sawsomething in the sky to the northeast of Lake Hortonia. He believes hesaw a meteorite and that's what triggered the earthquake. "It was likea streak of fire. I've heard meteorites hit before and that was what itsounded like. It was no earthquake, it was a meteor."

2007 - 7 June - Norway - A largemeteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impactan astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. Themeteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, June7th, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer skyabove the Arctic Circle. 'I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky,and this became a light with a tail of smoke. I heard the bang sevenminutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge ofdynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away.' The meteor struck amountainside in Reisadalen. The country's leading astronomer said heexpects the meteor to prove to be the largest to hit Norway in moderntimes, even bigger than the 198-pound Alta meteorite of 1904. 'If themeteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it tothe Hiroshima bomb. Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but inexplosive force we may be able to compare it to the bomb.'

2007 - 10 June - Sri Lanka - Thestrange objects that lit the night skies on June 10 have now beenconfirmed as meteors. "This is the first time that meteors of suchmagnitude have fallen in Sri Lanka. The shockwaves and vibrations havebeen heard throughout the country, from Galle to Puttalam. A SeniorConsultant believes that two large meteoroids entered the atmosphere,the larger one splitting into two and the smaller one into about 25fragments. The loud explosions were some of the particles exploding,probably about 50 to 100 km above the ground. In Kovinna, Andiambalama,at 9.05 p.m. on the 10th, a woman had noticed something unusual in thewestern sky. A bright light, almost as large as the full moon, appearedto be moving towards her in a wide arc. Alarmed by thoughts ofterrorist air attacks, she called out to her neighbour. Together theywatched fearfully as the glowing object drew closer, landed on the roofand vanished completely. A few minutes later the air vibrated with aloud explosion. The next day they discovered that parts of the asbestossheets on the roof were charred and cracked. A few pieces of rock andsand were scattered around the damaged area. Similar incidents werereported around the country that night. Several people in areas such asPuttalam, Maho and Bingiriya also noted the appearance of the brightlight in the sky as well as the loud explosion. In Kimbulapitiya awoman watched a flaming object land on a house and heard the boomingsounds soon afterwards. In Campbell Place, Dehiwala, the roofs of twobuildings were damaged, and a loud noise was heard. "24 asbestos sheetswere broken."

2007 - 26 July - Iowa - 5:30AM - ADubuque woman said she is lucky to be alive after a 50 pound chunk ofwhite ice crashed through the roof of her home, landing about 15 feetaway from where she was standing. She said it sounded like a bombexploded when the massive ball of ice hit her roof. Other large chunksof ice fell from the sky in this northeast Iowa city, tearing throughnearby trees. Dubuque had clear skies at the time the ice fell.

2007 - 1 August - India - Hotipur(Sangrur) village near Khanauri hit the headlines when a meteorite fellin the fields on Wednesday night, leaving many villagers baffled. Thepolice have taken possession of the 8-cm meteorite to hand it over to athree-member team of Geological Survey of India. Curious villagersqueued up in the fields to see the "heavenly object", while the farmer,who was the only witness to the fall of the "fireball", said, "I gotscared of the big fireball that was coming my way at 8:45 pm onWednesday night. I ran for cover as I felt that it will fall on me."(May be hoax.)

2007 - 11 Aug. - 12:09 am -Representatives with the Sonora Police Department and both the Tuolumneand Calaveras County Sheriff's Departments say they fielded numerouscalls early in the morning in regards to a "loud boom," and "structuresshaking." There were several calls from residents who reported seeing"a blue light," just before the "loud boom." The incident reportedlyoccurred at 12:09am. The Police Department notes that it also receiveda call from a resident in Tuolumne, in which a female reported seeingwhat she thought was fireworks, and then something spiraling over herhouse. Early indication from the law enforcement agencies is that theloud boom was somehow the result of a meteor shower.

2007 - 15 Sept. - Peruvian Highlands -The meteorite's impact sent debris flying up to 820 feet (250 meters)away, with some material landing on the roof of the nearest home 390feet (120 meters) from the crater. Nearby residents who visited theimpact crater complained of headaches and nausea.

2007 - 3 Oct. - Minnesota - Shortlyafter 2 p.m., people across the Twin Cities reported seeing a"metallic" object or "flaming ball" falling from the sky. Broadcastersand emergency dispatchers got hundreds of calls from people who saw theobject traveling from the northeast to the southwest. Residents of LyonCounty in far southwestern Minnesota reported a loud boom that mighthave been connected with the sightings in the Twin Cities. A man wholives near the town of Amiret says it shook his house and sounded likea sonic boom from an F-14 breaking the sound barrier at close range.Coincidentally, at the same time, drivers in the Twin Cities metro weredodging debris in the middle of Interstate 94. Some drivers said thedebris fell from the sky shortly after 2:00 p.m. Wednesday.

2008 - 5 Mar. - The Physics andAstronomy Department at Western has a network of all-sky cameras inSouthern Ontario that scan the sky monitoring for meteors. AssociateProfessor Peter Brown, who specializes in the study of meteors andmeteorites, says that Wednesday evening (March 5) at 10:59 p.m. ESTthese cameras captured video of a large fireball and the department hasalso received a number of calls and emails from people who actually sawthe light.

2008 - 8 Mar. - A resident of Yakasaid he heard a loud roaring noise at around 11:20 a.m. on the day themeteorite fell, sounding as if "a plane had crashed."

"We were amazed to find such a small stone after that thunderoussound. It was black and about 40 centimeters in diameter, weighingthree kilograms at most," another said, adding that the meteoriteopened a small crater in the ground and created a cloud of dust.

2008 - 10 Mar. - Sudbury, Canada -great balls of fire were seen falling from the sky - While mostsightings were reported around 1:30 p.m. near Sudbury, Hagar, Highway69 North and North Bay, Wayne Lachance spotted something in the skyearlier in the morning. Lachance was driving home to Massey after anight shift at Vale Inco Ltd. when something caught his eye around 7:30a.m. "I thought it was a real bright star," he said. "It was gettingbrighter and coming down with sparks." Lachance arrived home and lookedoutside his bedroom window to see "spirals of smoke" falling.

Rajasthan has once again witnessed the fall of a large meteorite,continuing with the unusually dense celestial shower over the desertState during the past decade. An iron meteorite fell at Kanvarpuravillage near Rawatbhata, where the Rajasthan Atomic Power Plant issituated, in the bright sunlight on August 29.

At least 10 cosmic bodies have fallen in the State, especially inits western parts, since 1995. The previous meteorite fall was reportedat Bhuka village in Barmer district in June 2005. The Kanvarpuracelestial object, made of iron, is the rarest of the three kinds ofmeteors, the other two being stony and stony iron meteors.

The Geological Survey of India (GSI), announcing the meteorite fallhere on Monday, said the cosmic shower in Kanvarpura was an"unspectacular event'' when compared with the fall of meteoritefragments in the rainy night sky in Gujarat recently. The meteorite,weighing 6.8 kg, landed at the rocky plains outside the village andcreated a small crater in the ground.

The Deputy Director General of GSI (Western Region), R.S. Goyal,said there were no fireworks in the sky as the fall was during the daytime at around 1:37 p.m. "The bright sunlight masked any glow in thesky and the event would have probably gone unreported but for twoshepherds who were there and reported the matter at the nearest policestation," he said.

The chemical and metallurgical analysis by the GSI scientists hasrevealed that the meteorite consists of 90 per cent iron, 8.5 per centnickel, 0.4 per cent cobalt and traces of other elements. Dr. Goyalsaid the geologists were yet to identify the cause of the unusuallyhigh incidence of meteorite fall in Rajasthan, but indicated that thedesert State's location at the Tropic of Cancer lying north of theEquator could be a factor that should be studied. meteorites originate,had a synchronised orbit vis-à-vis the Tropic of Cancer and themeteors, going astray from their orbit, generally enter the Earth'satmosphere over this line.

As the meteorite fell on the ground with a loud cracking sound, thetwo shepherds initially got frightened. Dr. Goyal said the enquirieshad revealed that the shepherds beat the meteorite with lathis anddragged it to some distance and immersed it in a small water body. TheGSI scientists, who rushed to the village, could get the meteorite withthe help of the local administration.

The opinions and concepts expressed are those of the author anddo not necessarily represent the position of the Department of Defenseor the United States Space Command

Introduction

A few weeks ago the world almost saw a nuclear war. Pakistan andIndia were at full alert and poised for a large-scale war - which bothsides appeared ready to escalate into nuclear war. The situation wasdefused - for now! Most of the world knew about this situation andwatched and worried. But few know of an event over the Mediterranean inearly June of this year that could have had a serious bearing on thatoutcome. U.S. early warning satellites detected a flash thatindicated an energy release comparable to the Hiroshima burst. We seeabout 30 such bursts per year, but this one was one of the largestwe've ever seen. The event was caused by the impact of a small asteroid- probably about 5-10 meters in diameter on the earth's atmosphere. Hadyou been situated on a vessel directly underneath the intensely brightflash would have been followed by a shock wave that would have rattledthe entire ship and possibly caused minor damage.

The event of this June caused little or no notice as far as we cantell. But had it occurred at the same latitude, but a few hoursearlier, the result on human affairs might have been much worse.Imagine that the bright flash accompanied by a damaging shock wave hadoccurred over Delhi, India or Islamabad, Pakistan? Neither of thosenations have the sophisticated sensors we do that can determine thedifference between a natural NEO impact and a nuclear detonation. Theresulting panic in the nuclear-armed and hair-trigger militaries therecould have been the spark that would have ignited the nuclear horrorwe'd avoided for over a half-century. This situation alone should besufficient to get the world to take notice of the threat of asteroidimpact.

The Threat

I've just relayed the aspect of the near-earth objects (NEO) thatshould worry us all. As more and more nations acquire nuclear weapons -nations without the sophisticated controls and capabilities build up bythe United States over the 40 years of Cold War - we must first andforemost ensure that the 30-odd impacts on the upper atmosphere arewell understood by all to be just what they are.

A few years ago those of us charged with protecting this nationsvital space system, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) becameaware of another aspect of the NEO problem. This was the Leonid meteorstorm. This particular storm occurs every 33 years. It is caused by thedebris from a different type of NEO - a comet. When the earthpasses through the path of a comet, it can encounter the dust thrownoff by that comet through its progressive passes by the Sun.This dust is visible on the Earth as a spectacular meteor storm. Butour satellites in space can experience the storm as a series ofintensely damaging micrometeorite strikes. We know about many of thesestorms and we've figured out their parent comet sources. But there aresome storms arising from comets that are too dim or spent for us tohave seen that can produce "surprise" events. One of these meteorstorms has the potential of knocking out some or even most of ourearth-orbiting systems. If just one random satellite failure in a pagercommunications satellite a few years ago seriously disrupted our lives,imagine what losing dozens of satellites could do!

Most people know of the Tunguska NEO strike in Siberia in 1908. Anobject probably less than 100 meters in diameter struck over Siberiareleasing the equivalent energy of up to 10 megatons. It leveled aforest 50 miles across. But most people don't know that wehave evidence of two other strikes during last Century. One occurredover the Amazon in the 1930s and another over central Asia in the 1940s.Had any of these struck over a populated area, thousands and perhapshundreds of thousands might have perished. Experts now tell us that aneven worse catastrophe that a land impact of a Tunguska-size eventwould be an ocean impact near a heavily populated shore. The resultingtidal wave could inundate shorelines for hundreds of miles andpotentially kill millions. There are hundreds of thousands of objectsthe size of the Tunguska NEO that come near the earth. We know theorbits of but a handful.

Finally, just about everyone knows of the "dinosaur killer"asteroids. These are those objects a few kilometers across that strikeon timescales of tens of millions of years. While the prospect of suchstrikes grab people's attention - and make great catastrophe movies -too much focus on these events has in my opinion beencounterproductive. In my organization, the Department of Defense, Ihave tried to raise our concern and interest in addressing the veryreal threats outlined above. However I get the predictable response."General, if this threat only hits every 50 million years, I think wecan focus our attention of more immediate threats!" In short the"giggle factor" in the professional scientific and national securitycommunity has meant that we have gotten little done on this problem.

What Should We Do?

First and foremost we must know when an objects strikes the earthexactly what it is and where it hit. Fortunately our early warningsatellites already do a good job of this task. And our next generationsystem, the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) will be even better.The primary difficulty here is that this data is also used for vitalearly warning purposes and its detailed performance is classified.However, in recent years the U.S. DoD has been working to provideextracts of this data to nations potentially under missile attack withcooperative programs known as "Shared Early Warning." Some data aboutasteroid strikes has also been released to the scientific community.Unfortunately this data takes several weeks to get released. Thus myfirst recommendation is that the United States DoD make provision toassess and release this data a soon as possible to all interestedparties - exercising proper cautions of course to ensure that sensitiveperformance data is safeguarded.

We have begun to scope what an NEO warning center might look like.We believe adding a modest number of people, probably less than 10 alltold, to current early warning centers and supporting staffs withinCheyenne Mountain could accomplish this. A Natural Impact WarningClearinghouse has been scoped to do this job.

Perhaps the most urgent mid-term task has already been begun. Thisis the systematic observation and cataloguing of close to allpotentially threatening NEOS. We are probably about halfway throughcataloging "large" NEOS (greater than a kilometer in diameter). It'sinteresting to note that the most effective sensor has been the MITLincoln Lab LINEAR facility in New Mexico. This is a test bed for thenext generation of military ground-based space surveillance sensors. Butthis ground-based system, however effective, can only really addressthe "large", highly unlikely threats. We find out every few weeks about"modest" asteroids a few hundred meters in diameter. These areoften caught as they sail by the earth, often closer than the Moon,unnoticed until they have nearly passed. Most recently the object2002MN had just this sort of near miss - this time only a few tens ofthousands of kilometers from the earth! Moreover, ground-based systemssuch as LINEAR are unable to detect one of the potentially mostdamaging classes of objects, those such as comets that come at us fromthe direction of the sun. New space-surveillance systems capable ofscanning the entire sky every few days are what's needed.

New technologies for both space-based and ground based surveys ofthe entire space near the earth are available. These technologies couldenable us to completely catalog and warn of objects as small as theTunguska meteor (less than 100 meters in diameter). The LINEAR systemis limited primarily by the size of its main optics - about 1 meter indiameter. By building a set of three-meter diameter telescopes equippedwith new large-format CCD-devices, the entire sky could be scannedevery few weeks. But more important the follow-up observationsnecessary to accurately define orbits, particularly for small objectscould be done.

The most promising systems for wide-area survey - particularly toobserve close to the sun to see objects coming at up from thatdirection - are space-based surveillance systems. Today the onlyspace-based space surveillance system is the DoD's "MSX" Satellite.This was a late 1990s missile defense test satellite and most of itssensors have now failed. However one small package weighing about 20 kgand called the "SBV" sensor is able to search and track satellites inGeosynchronous orbit using visible light. This has been a phenomenallysuccessful mission having lowered the number of "lost" objects in GEOorbit by over a factor of two. MSX is not used for imaging asteroids,but a similar sensor could be. The Canadian Space Agency, in concertwith the Canadian Department of National Defense is considering a"microsatellite" experiment with the entire satellite and payloadweighing just kg. This Near-Earth Surveillance System (NESS) wouldtrack satellites in GEO orbit, as MSX does today. However, it wouldalso be able to search the critical region near the sun for NEOs thatwould be missed by conventional surveys.

The U.S. DoD is planning a constellation of somewhat largersatellites to perform our basic satellite-tracking mission. Today ourground-based radars and telescopes, and even MSX only track objectsthat we already know about. These systems are not true outer-spacesearch instruments as the LINEAR system is. However, the futuremilitary space surveillance system would be able to search the entiresky. As an almost "free" byproduct it could also perform the NEO searchmission. Corresponding, larger aperture ground based systems could thenbe used to follow up to get accurate orbits for the NEOs discovered bythe space-based search satellites. Again, I believe there isconsiderable synergy between national security requirements related toman-made satellites and global security related to NEO impacts.

Regardless of how well we know NEO orbits and how well we canpredict their impacts the fact remains that today we have insufficientinformation to contemplate mitigating an impact. We do not know theinternal structure of these objects. Indeed, we have reason to believe that many, if not most are more in the nature of "rubble piles" than coherent objects.This structure suggests that any effort to "push" or divert a NEO mightsimply fragment it - and perhaps turn a single dangerous asteroid intohundreds of objects that could damage a much larger area.

What are needed are in-situ measurements across the many classes ofNEOs, including both asteroids and comets. This is particularly thecase of small (100meter) class objects of the type we would most likelybe called upon to divert. Until recently missions to gather these datawould have taken up to a decade to develop and launch and cost 100s ofmillions of dollars. However, with the rise of so-called"microsatellites" weighing between 50-200 kg and which are launchableas almost "free" auxiliary payloads on large commercial and otherflights to GEO orbit, the situation looks much better. These missionscan be prepared in one-two years for about $5-10M and launched for afew million dollars as an auxiliary payload. Such auxiliaryaccommodation is a standard feature on the European Ariane launched andshould be, with proper attention, here in the United States on our newEELV launcher systems.

With a capable microsatellite with several kilometers per second"delta-V" (maneuver capacity) launched into a GEO transfer orbit (thestandard initial launch orbit for placing systems into GEO) thesatellite could easily reach some NEOs and perform in-situ research.This could include sample return and direct impact to determine theinternal structure and potential to physically move a small object.Indeed, NASA is planning several small satellite missions. The keypoint here, however, is that with missions costing $10M each, we cansample many types of objects in the next decade or so to gain a fullunderstanding of the type of objects we face.

There is an interesting concept to consider. If we can find theright small object in the right orbit we might be able to nudge it intoan orbit "captured" by the earth. This would make a NEO a secondnatural satellite of earth. Indeed, there is at least one NEO that isclose to being trapped by the Earth now, 2002 AA29. If such an objectwere more permanently in earth orbit it could not only be more closelystudied but might form the basis for long-term commercial exploitationof space. Moreover, a very interesting next manned space flight missionafter the Space Station would be to an asteroid, maybe even one we putinto earth's gravity sphere.

The key of each of these proposed actions on developing the abilityto mitigate NEO impacts is that they are all items our nationalsecurity community and we in the United States are likely to do forother reasons. If these efforts can be adapted to the NEO threatproblem, this would add minimal additional expense.

One of the most important aspects of NEO mitigation is oftenoverlooked. Most experts prefer to focus on the glamorous "mitigation"technologies - diverting or destroying objects. In fact, as themilitary well knows the much harder part is what we call "command andcontrol." Who will determine if a threat exists? Who will decide on thecourse of action? Who will direct the mission and determine whenmission changes are to be made? Who will determine if the mission wassuccessful? And there are hosts more.

These command and control issues are those that the military haslong struggled with. The NEO community has not faced this essentialissue. Indeed, the United States Space Command has just completed aconcept of operations for the first step in NEO mitigation - a NaturalImpact Warning Clearinghouse. This operation is a command and controlfunction. It would be able to catalog and provide credible warninginformation on future NEO impact problems as well as rapidly provideinformation on the nature of an impact.

International Issues

Much discussion has been expended suggesting that any NEO impactmitigation should be an international operation. I would respectfullydisagree. International space programs such as the International SpaceStation fill many functions. An NEO mitigation program would have onlyone objective. In the latter case a single responsible nation andorganization would have the best chance of a successful mission.Moreover, the nation responsible would not need to worry about givingup national security sensitive information and technology as it wouldbuild and control the entire mission itself. For as pointed out themeans to identify threats and mitigate them overlap considerably withother national security objectives.

It does, however make considerable sense that the data gathered fromsurveys and in-situ measurements be fully shared among all. This willmaximize the possibility that the nation best positioned to perform amitigation mission would come forward. One of the first tasks of theNatural Impact Warning Clearinghouse noted above would be to collectand provide a distribution point for such data.

Summary

NEO Mitigation is a topic whose time has come. Various aspectsrelated to NEO impacts, including the possibility than an impact wouldbe misidentified as a nuclear attack, are critical national andinternational security issues. The focus of NEO mitigation efforts -both in finding and tracking them and in exploring and moving someshould shift to smaller objects. Not only are the near-term threatsmuch more likely to come from these "small" objects (100 meters indiameter or so), but we might also be able to divert such objectswithout recourse to nuclear devices.

The necessary command and control, sensor and space operationstechnologies and equipment are all "dual use" to the military. We havesimilar, and in some cases almost identical requirements. It thusstands to reason that strong military involvement and even lead in thedecades ahead on NEO mitigation is in order. As the U.S. Governmentconsiders how to proceed on this critical issue, the major role thatthe military and the technologies it controls should be carefullyintegrated into our overall national work.

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ON IMPACT FREQUENCY AND NEED FOR A WARNING CENTER

David Morrison

Impact Frequency

In his written statement (above) Pete Worden mentions three largeimpacts during the 20th century, and in his oral testimony he calledall three of these 100-m class impacts. He wrote: "Most people know ofthe Tunguska NEO strike in Siberia in 1908. An object probably lessthan 100 meters in diameter struck over Siberia releasing theequivalent energy of up to 10 megatons. It leveled a forest 50 milesacross. But most people don't know that we have evidence of two otherstrikes during last Century. One occurred over the Amazon in the 1930sand another over central Asia in the 1940s. Had any of these struckover a populated area, thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousandsmight have perished". Others have made similar comments, sometimes also including the dramatic Sikhote-Alin iron meteorite fall of February 12, 1947.

Of these four events, the Tunguska impact (June 30, 1908) of anasteroidal object nominally 60 m in diameter was by far the mostdangerous, producing an airburst releasing 5-15 megatons energy.Sikhote-Alin was well observed and studied, and more than 40 tons ofiron were recovered from multiple craters, but the estimated diameterof the projectile was no more than 3 meters. The Amazon impact in the1930s has been discussed but is based on scattered human reports withno supporting physical evidence, and most researchers suspect that thisimpact is spurious. I have not heard anything about the Kazakastanimpact of the 1940s, and I suspect that is spurious also.

Thus by my count for the 20th century we have one confirmed 60-mimpactor (Tunguska) and no evidence of anything else approaching thissize (although of course we would miss most impacts since they would occur in the ocean; absence of evidence in this case is not evidence of absence).For comparison, the latest estimated frequency of impact of 60-meterprojectiles is only about once per millennium, rather lower than theolder estimates of once every couple of hundred years.

Call for an NEO Warning Center

Several participants in the NEO Roundtable called for establishing aNEO coordination and warning center. In the summaries by the paneliststhis was a nearly unanimous recommendation. Worden wrote above that "We[USAF Space Command] have begun to scope what an NEO warning centermight look like. We believe adding a modest number of people, probablyless than 10 all told, to current early warning centers and supportingstaffs within Cheyenne Mountain could accomplish this. A Natural ImpactWarning Clearinghouse has been scoped to do this job."

It would be interesting to me to understand better what is meant bysuch a warning center. I think everyone can share Worden's concernabout misidentification of meteors that hit the atmosphere and explodewith kiloton-scale energies. I certainly support his proposal that thisinformation be disseminated more widely and quickly. However, these arenot what I call "warnings" -- they are timely reports on events thathave already happened and been observed from space.

The only warnings I know of would concern asteroids or cometsdiscovered to be on possible impact trajectories. Over the past 6 yearsthere have been several short-lived "warnings" of possible futureimpacts that were quickly withdrawn as new data and/or better orbitalcalculations became available. Today with multiple internationalcenters for calculating orbits and improved data sharing, it is likelythat there will be fewer such public warnings. In fact, the onlylegitimate warning (if you want to call it that) on the books today isNEA 1950DA, with a nominal chance of 1 in 300 of an impact in March2880.

As the NEA surveys increase in power, there will almost certainly beadditional cases of newly-discovered NEAs that appear for a short timeto have a possibility of colliding with the Earth. These will all bepredictions for far in the future, probably at least several decades.Some will be reported in the press, but most will be quietly checkedout and their orbits refined without the glare of publicity.Astronomers in several countries today have this computationalcapability. I therefore wonder what is the purpose of the proposedwarning center, and just what sort of warnings it anticipates issuing?

Perhaps it is worth repeating that none of the proposed surveys isdesigned to look for any NEA on its final plunge to collision with theEarth. Indeed, it would be very difficult and non-cost-effective to tryto design such a "last minute warning" system. The approach firstarticulated a decade ago is to survey the sky, discover NEAs, determinetheir orbits, and predict their future paths. Any potential impactorshould be picked up decades (or more) in advance. We can do thisbecause orbital dynamics is an exact science, and asteroids do notchange orbits capriciously. This approach will apply as well to thesmaller NEAs that are discovered in the future as it does to thosebeing found today. "Warning" is a word that conveys the wrongimpression: In my opinion, what we should be talking about arelong-term predictions, based on a comprehensive survey of NEAs.

Fragments of so-called Dakhla glass appear in clumps of ancient lake sediment excavated in Egypt's Western Desert. Scientists have concluded that the glass is the product of a meteorite slamming into Earth between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.

The glass - known locally as Dakhla glass - represents the firstclear evidence of a meteorite striking an area populated by humans.

At the time of the impact, the Dakhla Oasis, located in the westernpart of modern-day Egypt, resembled the African savanna and wasinhabited by early humans, according to archaeological evidence (see Egypt map.)

"This meteorite event would have been catastrophic for all livingthings," said Maxine Kleindienst, an anthropologist at the Universityof Toronto in Canada.

"Even a relatively small impact would have exterminated all life for [several] miles."

Crater Mystery

The origin of the glass had puzzled scientists since Kleindienst discovered it in 1987.

Some researchers had suggested the Stone Age glass may have been produced by burning vegetation or lightning strikes.

But a chemical analysis showed that the glass was created intemperatures so high that they could only have been the result of ameteorite impact.

Gordon Osinski, a geologist at the Canadian Space Agency inSaint-Hubert who conducted the analysis, found that the glass samplescontain strands of molten quartz, a signature of meteorite impacts.

"We can now say for definite that they were caused by a meteorite impact," he said.

Osinski is the lead author of the paper detailing the findings, which was published online in ScienceDirect.

But scientists have found no signs of an impact crater in the area.

"Usually from an impact like this, we should have a crater at least a kilometer [0.6 mile] across," Osinski said.

The absence of a crater, the scientists believe, suggeststhat the large space rock may have disintegrated upon entering Earth'satmosphere.

What happened may have been similar to the so-called Tunguska event,in which an asteroid exploded miles above the Earth's surface in aremote area of Siberia in 1908. That explosion felled an estimated 60million trees over 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers).

"There was no hole in the ground at Tunguska either," said AlbertHaldemann, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory inPasadena, California, who has been using radar to scour the Egyptiandesert for impact signs.

"In an air burst like that, contents of the explosion continue totravel downward ... providing a gas pulse across the [Earth's] surfacethat could vitrify sediments," Haldemann explained.

Life-Forms Killed

Scientists know much more about what happens when meteorites hithard rock than when they impact sand and sedimentary rock, as wouldhave been the case in the Egyptian desert.

At the time, there was a large lake in the area, the researchers say.

"If there was an impact at the surface and it happened to hit thelake, it wouldn't be surprising if the [crater] was filled in,"Haldemann said.

"Did the event boil the entire lake away, or did it just cause areally big wave to go across the lake? Maybe we can figure that outfrom the sediments."

Kleindienst, the anthropologist, has been excavating at the site for more than 20 years as part of the Dakhla Oasis project.

Kleindienst has obtained a large amount of evidence, includingspears and scrapers, to show that humans continually inhabited thisregion of Egypt's Western Desert during the Middle Stone Age, fromabout 200,000 to 30,000 years ago.

She has even found glass in lake sediments with archaeologicalevidence of human habitation in the soil layers below and above it.

"There is no reason to suspect that humans were not there at the time that this catastrophe happened," she said.

The meteorite research has important implications for understandingthe environmental and human history at the time, Kleindienst added.

"Calculations at Meteor Crater [in Arizona] give some idea of whatthe effect of a [relatively small] impact would be," she said.

"Life forms are killed or seriously injured for many tens of kilometers away from the impact.

"If this event happened during a humid period, the area might havebeen ecologically repopulated fairly quickly from surrounding areas,"she added.

"But if it happened during a dry period, it might have taken aconsiderable period for life to be re-established in the oasis region."

Haldemann, who is also the deputy project scientist on NASA's MarsExploration Rover project, says the meteorite strike underlines theinterconnectedness between Earth and the rest of the solar system.

"We already know the environment of the whole Earth is tied together," he said.

"What we've been learning more and more in the last 20 yearsor so is that we're also tied to the solar system as a whole overlonger time periods and that this interaction tends to be punctuated bythese catastrophic events.

"Here we have evidence in the [Early Stone Age] records that this kind of thing can really happen to us."

Saturn's bizarre moon Enceladus is a little more mysterious afterthe recent Cassini flyby found it to be remarkably like a comet in itsinternal chemistry.

"A completely unexpected surprise is that the chemistry ofEnceladus, what's coming out from inside, resembles that of a comet,"says Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute, principalinvestigator for the Cassini Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer. "Tohave primordial material coming out from inside a Saturn moon raisesmany questions on the formation of the Saturn system."

The March 12 flyby found the so-called "tiger stripes" around themoon's south pole are some 200 deg. F. warmer than the rest of the moon(although still a frigid -135 deg. F.). The tiger stripes - essentiallyfissures in the frozen surface - are the source of the spectaculargeysers of water and ice that spew so far into space that they actuallyfeed the nearby E-ring around Saturn.

When Cassini flew through the geysers at an altitude of 120 miles onits most recent pass, Waite's spectrometer found them a rich mix ofvolatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and monoxide and organicmaterials. Overall, the geysers were about 20 times denser thanexpected.

That, and the unexpectedly high temperatures associated with thegeysers, support speculation that they originate in a subsurface sea ofliquid water.

"Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of theessential building blocks needed for life," says Cassini ProjectScientist Dennis Matson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We havequite a recipe for life on our hands, but we have yet to find the finalingredient, liquid water, but Enceladus is only whetting our appetitesfor more."

Cassini is scheduled to make another close flyby of Enceladus inAugust as it continues its unprecedented tour of the Saturn system.

The Druids of ancient times had no illusions about the stability ofour planet, or about the other planets in our solar system. They hadinherited knowledge of earlier catastrophic happenings, and this ledthem to believe that the earth would be destroyed by fire and water.But they always preached that the universe and the souls of thoseliving in it are indestructible. In the legendary voyage of Snedgus andMcRiagla there is an island with two lakes, one of fire and the otherone of water.

In the Mythological cycle we are told that the world will end whenthe sun and moon will be mixed together. The Sorcerer Mathgen promisedto cast the mountains of Ireland on the Fomoire, and that the lakes andislands of Ireland would be hidden from the Fomoire, and that the DruidFigol would cause three showers of fire to fall upon the faces of theenemy and that Dagda, Lug and Ogma spent seven years making weapons andpreparing for battle in the heavens.In the Cattle Raid of Cooley thetransmitted memories of terrestrial catastrophes were left unmodifiedby the monk chroniclers, when Sualtaim, who was Cuchulains father, wastold about his son fighting against the odds and when he heard thenoise of the battle, he called out:"This is from afar. Is it the skythat cracks or the sea that ebbs or the earth that splits or is it thedistress of my son against the Foray of Cuailgne".When he got to hisson Cuchulain told him to go to the Ulstermen and tell them to protecttheir cattle. When Sualtaim reached Emain he told the Ulstermen andtheir King Conor..."Men are slain, women are carried off, cattle aredriven away, O Ulstermen." King Conor replied "A little too loud isthat cry, for the sky is above us, the earth beneath us, and the seaall around us, but unless the sky with its showers of stars fall uponthe surface of the earth or unless the ground burst open in anearthquake, or unless the fish abounding blue bordered sea come overthe surface of the earth, I shall bring back every cow to its byre andenclosure, every woman to her own abode and dwelling, after victory inbattle and combat and conquest." What I always find interesting is thethought that he would retrieve the cattle first, and the women second.

When Queen Meave had got the Brown Bull of Cooley and was on her wayhome, she sent MacRoth, her chief messenger to check if the Ulstermenwere following them over the plains of Meath. When MacRoth returned toQueen Meave he reported the following..."Not long was he there when heheard a noise and a tumult and a clamour. It seemed to him almost as ifthe sky had fallen onto the surface of the earth, or as if the fishabounding blue bordered sea had swept across the face of the world, oras if the earth had split in an earthquake, or as if the trees of theforest had all fallen into each others forks and bifurcations andbranches. However the wild beasts were hunted across the plain in suchnumbers that the surface of the plain of Meath was not visible beneaththem". This occurred over 100 years before the birth of Christ. Thestory was transmitted orally (like so many others) in the strict CelticBardic Tradition before being written down by unknown monks.

Ptolemy's biography of Alexander the Great tells us about a meetingof a Celtic Prince with Alexander on the lower Danube in 335 BC.Alexander was only 21 years of age and was publicly establishing theriver as the northern boundary of Greece. Alexander called for theallegiance of all the peoples south of the Danube. We have one storyabout a Celtic Prince who came to see Alexander. Only two sentenceshave survived on record. Alexander put the following question -"Tell meO Prince, what is it that you and your people fear most?"The replyholds race memories of cataclysms and shows the courage of the Celticrace. The Celtic Prince replies...."Only that the heavens might fall onour heads".

In the legendary account of the Destruction of Da Dergas Hostel,which is in Glenasmole, we have an account of the death of Conaire Kingof Ireland, whose rule was good and reign peaceful. He was returningfrom a visit to Munster where he had settled a quarrel between twofoster brothers of his and he stayed over at Da Dergas hostel. Thishostel was always open with food and lodging free to those upon theKings business. Conaire was given a welcome and Da Derga himselfprepared the feast. During the feast an earthquake shook the building"So that the weapons fell from their racks" . King Conaire cried outaloud -"I do not know what it is unless it be that the earth has beenrent, or that the Leviathan encircling the earth is striking with itstail to overturn the world, or the boat of the sons of Donn Desa thathas come to land".

Now the Leviation was a comet, which in ancient times was known as afiery dragon. Norse legend tells of three comets, a serpent, a wolf,and a dog. In the book of Job this Leviathan is referred to as theapostate dragon. Con Connor reckons to have found the site of Da DergasHostel. Using dowsing rods on the potential site, which was narroweddown after much research, we actually came across the crack left by theearthquake all those years ago. It is about six to eight feet wide,travels about north - south for hundreds of steps, and the now grassedover crack is clearly visible as a linear depression. Further south isa well-known standing stone alignment, which we believe to beannotating the earth fracture. The highest point has a bullaun stone,which is a huge boulder lying on its side with a 16 inch widedepression or bowl carved into it. Part of the story of the Destructionof Da Dergas hostel tells us that the hostel was visible from the sea,and this means that the sea was also visible from the Hostel. Standingbeside the bullaun stone there is an incredible panoramic view to Taraand Newgrange but also to the sea at Howth. One of the four Royal roadsto Tara came from Da Dergas Hostel in Glenasmole, and it seemsperfectly appropriate that Tara could be seen from the Hostel.Glenasmole has long been thought of as the Valley of the Thrushes, buta friend Thomas Maher, an Irish scholar, has brought us a propertranslation as the 'glen of the burnt out ruins'. From this site youcan also see the cairns on Tallaght and Saggart hills. HAG has gone tothis site on a HAG day out and the dowsing effects over this crack arequite powerful.

Our ancestors worshipped the external forces and factors thataffected their lives. To them the earth did not shake by chance. Theirchallenge was to discover what caused these dreadful happenings, and todo this they watched the heavens. In the Senchus Mor, we learn thatseven divisions of the firmament above the earth were recognized,consisting of the moon, mercury, venus, the sun, mars, jupiter andsaturn. About the stars they believed " as a shell is about an egg, thefirmament is about the earth. They believed that the twelveconstellations represented the year and that the sun runs through oneeach month. They believed that the earth was enclosed by a solid sky,outside of which was the Gods. The sun, moon, the planets and the starswere associated with these Gods. Celtic belief is that horses draw thechariot of the sun across the sky into the other world, to rest andthen return in the morning. Comets were seen as the armies of the Gods.Today's popular hobby of astrology has its origins in this memory, andfrom this the factual science of astronomy was born. But predictionsfrom observations in the heavens were not confined to just our ancientancestors....."For behold the day cometh that shall burn as anoven....." Malachi,c.iv,v.1. "And there appeared another wonder inheaven: and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and tenhorns, and seven crowns upon his head. And his tail drew the third partof the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth." Book ofRevelation, c.xii, 3and 4. "..... lo, there was a great earthquake; andthe sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became asblood...and the stars of heaven fell upon the earth ... and ... peoplehid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains... Book ofRevelation, c. vi.

Not far south of Glenasmole is the Scalp, a mountain I have yet toclimb. The steep west side is covered with thousands of great graniteboulders which do not just sit on this mountain but are in factembedded into it. P.A. O Suiochan in his book 'Ireland, A journey intolost time', sees this as mute but remarkable evidence of a massivecataclysm. Bray head is similar. Now this is the east side of Ireland,and the stones are embedded on the west side of the mountains, only theblue bordered sea could do such an incredible feat.Seven thousand yearsago, a warm stable climate predominated and blue skies were the norm inthis beautiful land. Professor Murphy of the Dublin Institute ofAdvanced Studies tells us that the seas around the south and west ofIreland were virtually stormless. We also know that the rise in sealevel was completed by about 5,500 years ago. This is also about thetime that Newgrange was abandoned. Whatever disaster caused this, wehave no Irish records, but we do have the Mayan Prophecies.

The 'Mayan' third age lasted from 7,000 BC to 3100 BC. They left theforest and rebuilt their world. They were farmers and ate tzinlocoacocthat is similar to almond paste as distinct to the wild fruits of theprevious age. This was the age of fire. The Mayan Prophecies tells usthat the third age ended about 3,100 BC or (5,100 years ago) whenexcessive UV was hitting the earth, consequently threatening humansurvival. The survivors of the third age then moved to the high plateauat Teothuacan. The third age ended when an increase in solar radiationled to a loss of fertility in people. The Irish Quartz age (our finalpassage cairn building age) ended about 5,000 or 5,500 years ago. Whenwe study with this as a filter we can see the various effects of UV indifferent zones. The Mayan Prophecies by Maurice Cotteral and AdrianGilbert shows the UV burn zone as 20 degrees north and south of theequator. Ireland is at 50 degrees north of the equator, over thirtydegrees above the burn zone. The effect at Irelands latitude was densecloud cover, permanent rain, flooding, and deluge. The transpirationcycle, the cycle of rain and rainmaking, tells us of an equal andopposite reaction with the sun on the sea making hot 'steam' and thenthe cold and heavy clouds falling as rain only to start all over again.When the burn zone was hot, there was very wet conditions elsewhere.This is when Irelands bogs began to expand and grow at an alarmingrate, and at this time the ancient Irish lived and farmed and had theirtemples on top of mountains. It just got too wet. Permanent rain!Imagine it!When we examine the known dwellings of that time we quicklysee that they were laid out compactly but not lived in all day by afamily as today.

The people of the Irish Quartz Age were an outdoor race meaning thattheir huts were for sleeping and their world was nature. This cloudcover would act as a quality UV filter. It would also prevent properharvests and procreation. The ability to construct so many huge stonetemples was and is today dependant on abundance. With permanent rainthis abundance began to fail, and solar engineering magic and weathermodifying just could not stop the change. The men, women and childrenof the Irish Quartz Age emigrated. They went to Europe and then toEgypt, and came back to Ireland as the Celtic Civilization. When theyreturned they never went back to live on top of the mountains, butinstead settled on the mountain slopes and the hilltops There was amajor volcanic eruption at Thera (Santorini) beside the island of Cretein the Mediterranean sea, which was the capitol of the Minoan Empire.This eruption was a major break in the earths surface, bigger thatKrakatoa and St. Helens. The movement of the earth's surface wascataclysmic and it happened over only a few days or weeks. Once it wasover, it is believed that it just closed up again. It is conceivablethat the force of that eruption could actually punch a hole through ouratmosphere, possibly allowing the cosmic cold to enter our atmosphere,or maybe the dust and debris thrown into our upper atmosphere createdweather conditions that blocked the suns rays from entering the zone 30to 50 degrees north of the equator. The Minoan culture had links withIreland before and after Thera erupted. The bull cult, the art, thedress style, the laws and so on, are all very Irish. It is possiblethat the Minoans had emigrated from Ireland about 5,500 years ago,bringing with them the wisdom of the ancient Irish stone age. But theycame home and this we have on record.

In the Irish book of Invasions there is a poem which has no name,but we have the name of its author, Roigne Rosgadach, son of UgoineMor, whose other son Mal, was then the monarch of Ireland. It is anaccount of the travels of a Celtic tribe or clan named the Gathelians,and it tells of their departure from Scythia to Egypt and from there toSpain and then from Spain to Ireland. The story goes that Mal requestedfrom Roigne detailed information on the origins of the his people andas always this was given in verse.

The truth of this is found in our historical records. This is thestory of the coming of the Milesians to Ireland, and it clearly tellsus of continual emigration for survival. This 'emigrate to surviveplan' was true on the other side of the Atlantic as well, as the HopiCreation myth tells us -

"Now the people began their migrations. Each group became a clan,some of them followed certain signs, some followed stars. They lefttheir writing on the rocks, and every so often they stopped and builtvillages. But they never stayed long before moving on once more. Theirguides were the sun, the moon, the stars, and their maize. If theyreached places where the maize failed to grow, they knew that they hadcome too far and they turned back"

Our armchair romantic perspective lets us fantasize about thewanderlust of our ancestors, when in fact the reality was failingharvests, failing birth rates, and their inherited memories of naturesabundance, i.e. when the Gods smiled upon us. In the last two thousandyears we have tried to dominate nature and to the profit of a minoritywe have succeeded, but there are huge famines happen all the time andthe majority of the world seems to be in panic for our future survival.We can blame the marketing overlords who create unreal desires, or thechurch, which does not cater to our modern spiritual needs, or thecorrupt politicians who squander our limited resources, but until weourselves take full responsibility for our own futures - we will alwaysbe in confusion.

Our ancestors took full responsibility for their futures and theyphysically moved on, today it seems that we must take fullresponsibility for our future and mentally move on.

Much has been written about Newgrange, mostly highly academic,sometimes completely ridiculous, but it all stems from the fascinationthat everybody who visits the place automatically gets. The firstwritten records of Newgrange are in the earliest Irish prose stories,the Mythological Cycle. Written in medieval times by the monks, theyare in fact much older. They are about the Tuatha De Danann, theearliest known native Irish Gods. They are disguised as a supernaturalrace of wizards and magicians. They descended from the sky in a metalship in the northwest and inhabited Ireland long before the Bronze Age.They are "The Lords of Light" that live in the great mound atNewgrange. The ancient name for Newgrange is Bru Na Boinne, and in thetranslation of this name is the first major clue to the wonders oftheir magic. Na Boinne means the river Boyne, and Bru means anotherworld palace or festive hall, existing in an eternal timelessrealm of the supernatural and not as a place of human habitation. Thisis the land of the Gods, a place of continual party where no one everdies. It is written that the Bru had three fruit trees that were alwaysin fruit, and an inexhaustable cauldron from which no company went awayunsatisfied. Today we would call this the land of milk and honey. Thefirst to live at this Bru was Elcmar, who was married to Boand, thedivinised personification of the river Boyne. Not much is known aboutElcmar, but the Boyne has magical and mystical attributes. The sourceof the Boyne is described as the well of Segais, an Otherworld Wellregarded as being the origin of all wisdom and occult knowledge. Thiswell is surrounded by hazel trees whose nuts drop into its water,forming na bolcca immaiss or bubbles of mystic inspiration. Either oncea year, or once in every seven years, these pass into the river Boyne.The next occupant of the Bru is Dagda. We know lots about Dagda, thegood god. He is the all powerful and omniscient and most prominent ofthe ancient native Irish gods. Also known as Ruad Ro-fhessa, the Lordof Great Knowledge. He is a sky god, and a god of the sun. Dagda livesin the Bru and has carnal union with Boand by using his mastery overtime. Elcmar is sent on an errand for one day, which really becomes aperiod of nine months.

During this time Oengus is conceived and born. He is called Mac indOc, meaning the youthful one by his mother who says: Young is the sonwho was begotten at the break of day and born betwixt it and evening.Oengus is regarded as a personification of the day, and he is born onthe start of the shortest day at Newgrange. Newgrange is also known asBru Mac ind Oc, or the Bru of Oengus. Now the story of his birth moveson to adulthood when he requests a Bru of his own. Dagda says, " I havenone for thee", Oengus replies" Thou let me be granted a day and anight in thine own dwelling ". When Dagda informs him " thou hastconsumed thy time", Oengus says, "It is clear that night and day arethe whole world, and it is that which has been given to me". From thenon it is Oengus who dwells in the mound at the bend in the Boyne.Amajor poem about the Brú and Oengus by George Russel has Aengus himselftalk about the past days of glory at the Brú while also implying itspresent state as a catastrophe. A Dream of Angus Oge, George Russel1897

"As he spoke, he paused before a great mound grown over with trees,and around it silver clear in the moonlight were immense stones piled,the remains of an original circle, and there was a dark low narrowentrance leading within- He took Con by the hand and in an instant theywere standing in a lofty, cross shaped cave, built roughly of hugestones. "This was my place. In days past many a one plucked here thepurple flower of magic and the fruit of the tree of life . . ."And evenas he spoke, a light began to glow and to pervade the cave, and toobliterate the stone walls and the antique hieroglyphics engraventhereon, and to melt the earthen floor into itself like a fiery sunsuddenly uprisen within the world, and there was everywhere a wanderingecstasy of sound; light and sound were one; light had a voice... " I amAengus, men call me young. I am the sunlight in the heart, themoonlight in the mind; I am the the light at the end of every dream...I will make you immortal; for my palace opens into the Gardens of theSun".

In the Fenian cycle, the latest tradition in literature, Oengusreappears when Finn Mc Coole describes the mound as the house ofOengus, which cannot be burned or destroyed as long as Oengus is alive.The famous love story of Diarmaid and Graine also connect to the Bruwhen Diarmaid is dying, partly because of Finn McCoole, and Finn says," Let us leave this tulach for fear that Oengus and the Tuatha DeDanann may catch us". Finn then brings Diarmaid to Newgrange in orderto " put aerial life into him so that he will talk to me every day".

This story has many of the magical components of the Egyptian storyof Isis bringing Osiris back to life in the great pyramid. Many othersimilar links between the Egyptian magical tales and the older Irishmagical tales exist which suggests that the magical and astronomicalskills of the Egyptians had their origin in Ireland. The very curioustale of the high King, Conn, and the Ri Raith (Royal Fortress) at Taraentitled "The magical stone of Tara" states; -

One evening Conn of the hundred battles repaired at sunrise to theRi Raith at Tara, accompanied by his three Druids, Mael, Bloc andBluicne, and his three poets, Ethain, Cord and Cesare; for he wasaccustomed every day to repair to this place with the same company, forthe purpose of watching the stars, that no hostile aerial beings shoulddescend upon Ireland unknown to him. While standing in the usual placeone morning, Conn happened to tread on a stone, and immediately thestone shrieked under his feet so as to be heard all over Tara andthroughout all East Meath. Conn then asked the Druids why the stone hadshrieked, what its name was and what it said. Fifty three days laterthey answered; - Fal is the name of the stone, and it comes from theIsland of Fal.

This is the Lia Fal, the stone of destiny, which was brought toIreland by the Tuatha De Dannan, and this stone is still within theRoyal Fortress at Tara, although it is no longer beside the passagecairn, it is only 400 yards from its original site (there is a storythat the real Lia Fail is under the coronation seat at Westminster).Here we have a King making astronomical observations, and declaring hisinterest in " hostile aerial beings" at a temple that was at that timethousands of years old. The cairn at Tara is even today brilliantlyilluminated at the time of two important Celtic festivals; Samhain inearly November and Imbolc in early February.

Today's Irish Druids can have no illusions about the stability ofour planet, or about the other planets in our solar system. We have theold Druids knowledge of actual impending catastrophic happenings - thatthe earth would be destroyed by fire and water. We have modernecological and environmental awareness of the global weather patternscollapsing. The fire of the internal combustion engine has consumednearly all the fossil oxygen in our atmosphere. Commercialdeforestation has destroyed the air and water cycles in ways that willtake many thousands of years to self-repair. These modern loomingcatastrophes are denied by the governments of the money lenders buteven the dogs in the street know its bad and that it's getting worse.But today's Celtic Druids know that the Universe and the souls of thoseliving in it are indestructible - so we live in the here and now - justas our ancestors did.

There is a major meteor shower next month, the Lyrids, peaking onthe evening of April 21. Unfortunately, an almost-full moon will shinein the sky all night, making viewing conditions less than ideal forseeing many meteors.

The radiant is between Lyra and Hercules but won't even begin torise until 9:30 p.m., when the moon is well up in the eastern sky.Fortunately, there are many other science-related events going on righthere in the Islands to satisfy your celestial appetite.

Consider coming to the Bishop Museum Sky Tonight evening program, onFriday. This is an hourlong planetarium program concentrating ondetails of the month's sky, with the opportunity to do some telescopeviewing if the weather cooperates. Please note that this program hasbeen moved by an hour, now starting at 8 p.m., and reservations arerequired. Call 848-4168 for reservations and information. There is acharge of $4 for non-Bishop Museum members.

The 51st Hawai'i State Science and Engineering Fair is anotherlearning opportunity open to the public on Wednesday. Amazing andimaginative displays and projects from more than 400 studentsrepresenting 80 schools around the state will be on display at the NealBlaisdell Center Exhibition Hall from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. In addition tothese fascinating and sometimes amusing presentations (is your mouthcleaner than your dog's?), there are several other special exhibits aswell.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is sponsoring avisit by TERRI, a 5-foot-tall sophisticated robot that sings, tellsstories and converses with people. NOAA will also bring an interactivecomputer exhibit called SciLands - a virtual world in which to explorethe Earth in ways most people would never experience. With your virtualpersonality, you can float on a thundercloud, fly through a hurricane,explore underwater caves and more in the Second Life world. The AirForce Association will have a full-size model of the space shuttlecockpit to walk through. All this is free and open to the public onWednesday.

On Saturday the Bishop Museum hosts the 4th annual Mad About ScienceFestival from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with the theme, "Healthy Living, HealthyPlanet," focusing on ideas from medicine to global warming. The popularbehind-the-scenes tours of the museum's natural sciences collectionswill be offered and special programs and activities for the entirefamily will be ongoing throughout the day.

Speakers from environmentally conscious businesses and governmentagencies in the community will offer talks on keeping our lifestyles,homes and land healthy and safe. NOAA will again make an appearancewith TERRI, SciLands demonstrations and hands-on activities for thekids. This is also the last few weeks of the Bishop Museum's specialexhibit, Animal Grossology, which will be open during the Mad AboutScience Festival.

At the end of the month, on April 27, the University of Hawai'iInstitute for Astronomy will hold its annual Open House from 11 a.m. to4 p.m. Many fascinating astronomy displays, talks and activities willbe offered from the Institute and its partners (including the BishopMuseum). This event is free and open to the public.

Finally, a sneak peek into activities in May - Big Island residentscan look forward to AstroDay May 3 at the Prince Kuhio Plaza in Hilo.It's a daylong celebration of the science, technology and culture inHawai'i involving participants from all over the state.

More on the Southern Cross

Several readers commented on the fact that one of the featuredconstellations I wrote about last month, the Southern Cross, was notvisible in last month's map. That is because our map can only show onepart of the evening sky and we chose to illustrate the sky only until10 p.m. or so. Unfortunately for last month that just missed the timethe Cross rose in the sky. However, since the stars rise around fourminutes earlier each night (because of our orbit around the sun) thismeans that by the end of the month those stars rise roughly two hoursearlier. Therefore, the Southern Cross will be on our map this timesince it will be up in the south by 10 p.m. at the beginning of April.

The Planets

Mercury:

Mercury is traveling behind the sun this month but by the last fewdays of April emerges low in the western sky at evening twilight. ThePleiades sits near the small planet but that little cluster, along withthe other stars associated with the winter sky, are gettingprogressively lower in the west and more difficult to see as the daysget longer.

Venus:

Like Mercury, Venus is also preparing to go behind the sun,although it still has a couple months to go. But it is very close tothe sunrise, rising less than an hour before the sun in early April andhalf an hour in late April. By then it will be too challenging to seeuntil it reappears in the evening sky in late summer.

Mars:

Mars starts off the month on the side of the brother Castor in theconstellation of Gemini. As the month progresses, the planet begins toshift eastward toward the other twin Pollux and by the last day ofApril appears as almost a third "brother" in the constellation. OnApril 11, a first quarter moon skims by the Red Planet, making for anice sight with binoculars or a telescope.

Jupiter:

Jupiter rises in the east by 2 a.m. in early April and two hoursearlier at the end of the month. It will appear right above a thirdquarter moon on April 27, very early in the morning. The giant planetis heading toward opposition in July, so it is getting bigger andbrighter in our night sky as we approach that date.

Saturn:

Saturn is nicely placed at the "top" of the sky as night falls inthe constellation of Leo. The pale golden planet is only a few degreesfrom the star Regulus, the heart of the lion. Three days after visitingnear Mars, the moon pays a call on the Saturn and Regulus on April 14.

Researchers who cracked the cuneiform symbols on the Planispheretablet believe that it recorded an asteroid thought to have been morethan half a mile across.

The tablet, found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library inthe royal place at Nineveh in the mid-19th century, is thought to be a700BC copy of notes made by a Sumerian astronomer watching the nightsky.

He referred to the asteroid as "white stone bowl approaching" and recorded it as it "vigorously swept along".

Using computers to recreate the night sky thousands of years ago,scientists have pinpointed his sighting to shortly before dawn on June29 in the year 3123BC.

About half the symbols on the tablet have survived and half of thoserefer to the asteroid. The other symbols record the positions of cloudsand constellations. In the past 150 years scientists have made fiveunsuccessful attempts to translate the tablet.

Mark Hempsell, one of the researchers from Bristol University whocracked the tablet's code, said: "It's a wonderful piece ofobservation, an absolutely perfect piece of science."

He said the size and route of the asteroid meant that it was likelyto have crashed into the Austrian Alps at Köfels. As it travelled closeto the ground it would have left a trail of destruction from supersonicshock waves and then slammed into the Earth with a cataclysmic impact.

Debris consisting of up to two thirds of the asteroid would havebeen hurled back along its route and a flash reaching temperatures of400C (752F) would have been created, killing anyone in its path. Aboutone million sq km (386,000 sq miles) would have been devastated and theimpact would have been equivalent to more than 1,000 tonnes of TNTexploding.

Dr Hempsall said that at least 20 ancient myths record devastationof the type and on the scale of the asteroid's impact, including theOld Testament tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and theAncient Greek myth of how Phaeton, son of Helios, fell into the RiverEridanus after losing control of his father's sun chariot.

The findings of Dr Hempsall and Alan Bond, of Reaction Engines Ltd, are published in a book, A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event.

The researchers say that the asteroid's impact would explain why atKöfels there is evidence of an ancient landslide 5km wide and 500mthick.

Tale of devastation

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and firefrom the Lord out of Heaven; and he overthrew those cities and all thevalley, and all the inhabitants of the cities . . . [Abraham] lookeddown toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley,and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of afurnace.

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzledscholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time. Thetablet is now known to be a contemporary Sumerian observation of anasteroid impact at Köfels, Austria and is published in a new book, A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event.

The giant landslide centred at Köfels in Austria is 500m thick andfive kilometres in diameter and has long been a mystery sincegeologists first looked at it in the 19th century. The conclusion drawnby research in the middle 20th century was that it must be due to avery large meteor impact because of the evidence of crushing pressuresand explosions. But this view lost favour as a much betterunderstanding of impact sites developed in the late 20th century. Inthe case of Köfels there is no crater, so to modern eyes it does notlook as an impact site should look. However, the evidence that puzzledthe earlier researchers remains unexplained by the view that it is justanother landslide.

This new research by Alan Bond, Managing Director of ReactionEngines Ltd and Mark Hempsell, Senior Lecturer in Astronautics atBristol University, brings the impact theory back into play. It centreson another 19th century mystery, a Cuneiform tablet in the BritishMuseum collection No K8538 (known as "the Planisphere"). It was foundby Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the Royal Place atNineveh, and was made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC. It is anastronomical work as it has drawings of constellations on it and thetext has known constellation names. It has attracted a lot of attentionbut in over a hundred years nobody has come up with a convincingexplanation as to what it is.

With modern computer programmes that can simulate trajectories andreconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers haveestablished what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of thenight notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in thesky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar). Half thetablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any othernight, but the other half of the tablet records an object large enoughfor its shape to be noted even though it is still in space. Theastronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to thestars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with animpact at Köfels.

The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre indiameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a classof asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with theEarth's orbit. This trajectory explains why there is no crater atKöfels. The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means theasteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town ofLängenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid toexplode before it reached its final impact point. As it travelled downthe valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter(the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormouspressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but becauseit was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impactcrater.

Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: "Anotherconclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from theexplosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Seare-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

"The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite anyflammable material - including human hair and clothes. It is probablemore people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impactblast."

The full translation of the tablet together with the analysis supporting these conclusions can be found in the book, A Sumerian Observation of the Kofels' Impact Event published by Alcin Academics, ISBN 1904623646, priced at £12.99.

Evidence of the biggest meteorite ever to hit the British Isles hasbeen found by scientists from the University of Oxford and theUniversity of Aberdeen. The scientists believe that a large meteoritehit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottishtown of Ullapool.

If there had been human observers in Scotland 1.2 billion years ago they would have seen quite a show.

Previously it was thought that unusual rock formations in the areahad been formed by volcanic activity. But the team report in thejournal Geology that they found evidence buried in a layer ofrock which they now believe is the ejected material thrown out duringthe formation of a meteorite crater. Ejected material from the hugemeteorite strike is scattered over an area about 50 kilometres across,roughly centred on the northern Scottish town of Ullapool.

Ken Amor of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, co-author on the Geologypaper, said: 'Chemical testing of the rocks found the characteristicsignature of meteoritic material, which has high levels of the keyelement iridium, normally only found in low concentrations in surfacerocks on Earth. We found more evidence when we examined the rocks undera microscope; tell-tale microscopic parallel fractures that also implya meteorite strike.'

The proposed volcanic origin for the rock formations has always beena puzzle as there are no volcanic vents or other volcanic sedimentsnearby. Scientists took samples from the formations during fieldwork in2006 and have just had their findings published.

Professor John Parnell, Head of Geology & Petroleum Geology atthe University of Aberdeen, also a co-author on the paper, said: 'Theserocks are superbly displayed on the west coast of Scotland, and visitedby numerous student parties each year. We're very lucky to have themavailable for study, as they can tell us much about how planetarysurfaces, including Mars, become modified by large meteorite strikes.Building up the evidence has been painstaking, but has resulted inproof of the largest meteorite strike known in the British Isles.'

'If there had been human observers in Scotland 1.2 billion years agothey would have seen quite a show,' commented Oxford University's KenAmor. 'The massive impact would have melted rocks and thrown up anenormous cloud of vapour that scattered material over a large part ofthe region around Ullapool. The crater was rapidly buried by sandstonewhich helped to preserve the evidence.'

Scott Thackrey, a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen, andalso co-author of the paper, said: 'The type of ejected depositdiscovered in North West Scotland is only observed on planets andsatellites that possess a volatile rich subsurface, for example, Venus,Mars and Earth. Due to the rare nature of these deposits, each newdiscovery provides revelations in terms of the atmospheric and surfaceprocesses that occur round craters just after impact.'

Since the formation of the solar system leftover space material hascollided regularly with the Earth and other planets. Some of theseimpacts are large enough to leave craters, and there are about 174known craters or their remnants on Earth.

Oxford's Ken Amor said: 'This is the most spectacular evidence for ameteorite impact within the British Isles found to date, and what wehave discovered about this meteorite strike could help us to understandthe ancient impacts that shaped the surface of other planets, such asMars.'